so we finally did a proper simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group, been planning it for like three months and honestly i wasnt sure what to expect. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off the county EOC from the hospital and two shelters, and we had to establish net control and pass traffic between all the sites using only our HF and VHF assets since we assumed internet and cell was down.

what surprised me the most was how fast things got confusing when multiple operators started checking in at once. we had practiced individual skills but nobody really drilled on net discipline and it showed — people were doubling, talking over each other, and one guy kept giving long ragchew-style status reports when a short formatted message would have done the job. we ended up losing about 20 minutes just sorting out who was on frequency and what priority each message had.

also learned that written message forms matter way more than i thought. we had one operator at the shelter improvising his traffic off the top of his head and by the time it got relayed to EOC some of the details had shifted. like a telephone game. ICS 213 forms exist for a reason and we were kinda sloppy about enforcing them at the start.

anyway overall it was really valuable and kind of humbling. would love to hear if others have done similar exercises and what tripped them up — especially curious if anyone has tips for training newer operators on net control procedures before they get thrown in during an actual event.

yeah the net discipline thing is huge and it almost always bites groups on their first real exercise. ive seen it so many times. the fix that worked for our group was doing short tabletop drills specifically focused on nothing but check-in procedures — not a full scenario, just practicing the rhythm of net control acknowledging stations, assigning them roles, and managing who talks when. boring stuff but it builds the muscle memory so when stress is actually present people fall back on the habit instead of improvising.

the ICS 213 thing is also spot on. what helped us was printing like way more forms than we thought we needed and putting them at every station before the exercise starts, and having one person whose only job early on is making sure outgoing messages are filled out before they hit the air. once you let it slide even once the whole thing gets sloppy fast. sounds like you got a ton of good data from this though, thats really the whole point of the exercise.

this is making me want to push our club to actually do one of these. we talk about it every few months at meetings but it never seems to happen. how did you get the EOC to participate — was that hard to arrange or did they kind of reach out to you first?