so we finally did a full SET with our county ARES group saturday and honestly it went way better than i expected but also highlighted some stuff we really need to work on. the scenario was a prolonged power outage combined with a flood event that took out the repeater infrastructure, so we were operating mostly simplex and trying to pass formal NTS traffic to the EOC.

the part that caught us off guard was how quickly people forgot net discipline when things got hectic. everyone wanted to talk at once, we had two people calling in with health and welfare traffic at the same time someone was trying to pass a formal message, it just got messy fast. our net control did a decent job but you could tell she wasnt used to managing that volume simultaneously.

one thing that worked really well was having a designated liaison station at the EOC who was only handling traffic from the field teams — that single point of contact made a huge difference once we settled into it. we also learned that not enough of our members have practiced sending ICS-213 formatted messages over voice, like they know how to fill out the form but translating it to a proper voice transmission is its own skill.

anyway wondering if anyone elses group has done similar exercises and what lessons came up for you. particularly curious if anyone has dealt with the transition from normal repeater ops to going full simplex during a drill.

yeah the simplex transition is always the one that bites people. we did a drill a few years back where we deliberately killed the repeater about 30 minutes in without warning and half the group just kind of... went silent. they didnt know what frequency to move to, didnt have a pre-planned simplex channel in their radios, some were even trying to reach the repeater input thinking it was a technical issue. total chaos for maybe 10 minutes until someone thought to announce a fallback on 146.52.

after that we added a requirement that every member has at least three local simplex freqs programmed and we do a short simplex-only portion of every monthly net now, even if its just passing one piece of traffic. makes a big difference over time. the other thing we found was that HF capability was almost completely untapped in our group — we had maybe two or three people who could actually operate HF under stress and get traffic out to the section. thats a gap worth addressing if your county is similar.

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to all the ARES stuff and havent been through a full SET yet. our EC keeps saying theyll schedule one but it hasnt happened. the part about the ICS-213 over voice is something i hadnt even thought about — i assumed knowing how to fill out the form was the whole thing. is there a good resource for practicing that or do you just kind of work through it with people on the air?