so i finally participated in a full SET (simulated emergency test) with our county ARES group and i honestly thought i was more prepared than i was. been licensed about 4 years now, HF and VHF, done plenty of nets, figured how hard can it really be when its not a real emergency. turns out pretty hard actually.

the scenario was a flood event, EOC was activated, we had to handle health and welfare traffic and coordinate with the served agency which in our case was the county emergency management office. first thing that went wrong was my go-kit battery situation — i tested it indoors a week before and it was fine but sitting outside for 3 hours in the heat it started acting up and my output was dropping. not exactly a great look.

but honestly the bigger lesson for me was message handling. i havent done formal radiogram traffic in probably two years and it showed. had to ask the net control to repeat stuff twice and i could hear the slight pause before he said 'no problem' lol. also propagation on 40m was weird that morning and we had a lot of stations trying to check in at once which created some chaos on the frequency.

anyone else done these SET exercises and have lessons learned to share? especially curious if other groups do tabletop exercises before the actual radio portion or if you just jump in. our EC mentioned maybe doing that next year but nothing formal yet.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. i made the same mistake early on — tested my setup in the garage, everything perfect, then showed up to an actual deployment in july and my sealed lead acid was just not having it after a couple hours. switched to a LiFePO4 a while back and that helped a lot but even then you gotta actually run it under real conditions before you trust it.

on the traffic handling piece, honestly the best thing i found was just getting back on a traffic net regularly even when theres no emergency. our section has a nightly net and i pop on maybe once or twice a week just to stay sharp. it feels kind of slow and old fashioned sometimes but when you actually need to pass a formal message under stress your hands just kind of know what to do. the tabletop idea your EC mentioned is really worth pushing for. we did one a couple years back before our SET and it made a huge difference — people figured out a lot of the coordination stuff on paper before anyone keyed up, which meant when we actually got on the air we werent reinventing things in real time.

this is making me want to actually join my local ARES group, ive been putting it off because i feel like i dont know enough yet but maybe thats the wrong way to think about it. do they take people who are still pretty new or is it mostly experienced ops