so we finally got our county ARES group to do a proper SET last Saturday and honestly it was a real eye opener. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and kept putting it off because people were busy or whatever, but the EC finally just picked a date and said we're doing it.

the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off the main EOC from three of the outlying shelters - we had to establish net control, pass ICS-213 traffic, and keep a resource net running simultaneously. on paper it sounds straightforward but man when you're actually doing it with real people on real radios everything just kind of falls apart in interesting ways.

biggest thing i noticed was how fast people forget proper net discipline when there's any kind of simulated stress. we had stations just jumping in mid-traffic, people using their call signs backwards, one guy was transmitting on the wrong frequency for like 20 minutes and didn't realize it because he had a split set up from something else. nothing catastrophic but the kind of stuff that in a real event could really slow things down.

also our backup power situation was kind of embarrassing, two of our key nodes had batteries that hadn't been tested in over a year and one of them died about 45 minutes in. lesson very much learned on that one.

anybody else done a SET recently? curious what scenarios other groups are running because i feel like flooding is kind of the default and it might be good to mix it up.

yeah the battery thing gets people every time. we did a drill back in the spring and i swear half the group had never actually run their station off battery under any kind of load for more than a few minutes. one guy thought his 35ah battery was fully charged because his voltmeter said 12.6v sitting there with nothing connected - put a 25w load on it and it started sagging within the hour. we ended up making battery load testing a required checklist item before any activation now.

the net discipline thing is real too. we use a buddy system now where newer operators are paired with experienced ones specifically so someone can tap them on the shoulder when they're about to key up at the wrong time. feels a little babysitting-ish but it actually helps a lot. the stress simulation is hard to replicate but even just having someone timing you and calling out "shelter 3 needs a status update NOW" does something to people's brains.

for scenarios we've done winter storm shelter coordination and a comms-out hospital coordination drill which was interesting because the hospital staff had no idea what to do with us at first. that one taught us as much about interfacing with served agencies as it did about radio ops.

this is making me want to actually get involved with my local ARES group tbh. ive had my general for almost two years and mostly just do some HF stuff but i always figured emcomm was kind of above my skill level. sounds like even the experienced people are figuring things out as they go though which is reassuring i guess lol. do most groups welcome people who are still pretty new or do they want you to have like a certain amount of experience first?