so we finally got our county ARES group to run a proper SET last Saturday and honestly it was way more eye-opening than I expected. been doing this hobby for about 12 years and thought I had a pretty good handle on how emergency comms would go but wow, we had some real gaps show up fast.

the scenario was a prolonged power outage across three counties, EOC activations, the whole deal. we had maybe 14 operators show up which was actually better turnout than I expected but here's where it got interesting — about a third of them hadnt actually tested their go-kits in over a year. one guy's battery was completely dead, another had a radio that had been dropped at some point and the display was glitchy. nothing catastrophic but exactly the kind of stuff you dont find out about until you need the gear.

the other thing that really stood out was net control. we had two people sort of trying to be net control at the same time for the first hour because nobody had clearly been assigned that role ahead of time. message traffic was a mess. we use Winlink for our digital side and that went pretty smoothly actually, the VHF nets had more confusion than anything.

anyway curious if other groups do these regularly and what kind of scenarios you've found most useful. we're thinking about doing one that simulates a communications blackout where we have to fall back to HF only and work around it.

yeah the net control thing is such a common problem and I've seen it happen at real activations too, not just drills. our group made a rule that the net control assignment gets sent out by email at least 48 hours before any drill or activation and the person has to acknowledge it. sounds like overkill but it made a huge difference.

the dead battery situation is basically unavoidable unless you build some kind of check-in process. we started doing a quarterly 'gear night' where people just bring their go-kits to the club meeting and we do a quick sanity check together. found all kinds of stuff — wrong cables, outdated ICS forms, one guy had a handheld with firmware from like 2015. its more social than anything but it keeps people honest about maintaining their kits.

the HF fallback scenario is a great idea. we did something similar a couple years ago where we pretended all repeaters were down and had to establish direct HF links between served agencies. biggest lesson there was that a lot of guys who are solid on VHF packet get really uncomfortable operating HF phone under pressure. worth doing for sure.

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to the whole ARES side of things and just joined my local group a few months ago. havent been through a full SET yet but we have one coming up in the fall and im a little nervous about it honestly. mostly worried ill freeze up or do something wrong on the air when there's actual traffic to pass.

does your group do any kind of training before the big exercise or is it kind of just thrown in the deep end? i've been practicing ICS 213 forms on my own but passing formal traffic on a net is still something i need more reps on