so we finally got around to doing a proper SET with our county ARES group last saturday and i have to say it was a real eye opener. we had about 14 operators participate which is honestly more than i expected to show up on a cold morning.

the scenario was basically a major flood event cutting off the EOC from the hospital and two shelter sites. we were supposed to relay health and welfare traffic and coordinate resource requests using only simplex HF and local VHF since we assumed the repeater infrastructure was down. and that assumption alone caused like half our problems because nobody had practiced net control on simplex in ages. people kept forgetting to ID properly, there was a ton of stepping on each other, and at one point we lost contact with the shelter team for almost 20 minutes because nobody had pre-coordinated a fallback frequency.

the lesson that hit me hardest was how much we rely on muscle memory from nets that use repeaters and how badly that breaks down when you yank the infrastructure out. also discovered that two of our members didnt actually have their go-bags ready to deploy — like they had the bag but the batteries were dead and one guy's radio hadn't been turned on in six months.

anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises recently and what tripped you up. we're planning a debrief writeup for the section newsletter but wanted to get some outside perspectives first.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. we did a drill back in spring where we made a rule that if your equipment didnt power up within the first five minutes of activation you were considered "unavailable" for the scenario. brutal but effective — you should have seen the scramble at the next meeting when people actually started checking their gear dates on their gel cells.

the simplex coordination issue is real. we spent a whole training session just doing simplex net control practice on a dead Sunday morning and it felt kind of silly at the time but when our repeater actually went down during a windstorm last February people knew what to do. the fallback frequency thing is huge and honestly should be in writing somewhere everyone can find it without thinking, not just something the net manager knows.

one thing we added to our SET debrief form is a column for "assumed vs actual" — basically where did your mental model of how things would go wrong match reality and where didn't it. turns out most of our failures were in the assumed category, stuff we thought we had covered.

this is really interesting to read as someone who just got their ticket a few months ago. i joined ARES pretty much right away because thats part of why i wanted to get licensed in the first place but i honestly had no idea how complicated the coordination side of things gets when you remove the repeater from the equation. i kind of assumed the radio part was the hard part and everything else would just sort of happen.

do most groups have like a written protocol document people are supposed to study or is it mostly learned through drills like this? asking because our local group hasn't done a SET in a while and i feel like im missing context that everyone else just kind of absorbed over time.