so we finally got around to doing a proper SET last Saturday and honestly it was a mixed bag. the scenario was a tornado touchdown that took out the EOC's primary comms and we were supposed to provide backup voice and digital traffic handling for about 4 hours. on paper it sounded straightforward but man did things fall apart in interesting ways.

biggest lesson for me personally was how fast people forget basic net control discipline when things get even a little chaotic. we had operators jumping in out of turn, one guy was transmitting way too long trying to explain something that could have been a 10 second message, and we had a couple people who apparently hadn't looked at the ICS forms in like two years and were basically guessing. not throwing anyone under the bus, i've done the same thing.

the digital side actually went pretty well, we had winlink running through a couple different paths and managed to get simulated health and welfare traffic through even when we had to reroute around the node that was pretending to be down. that part i was happy with. but it also exposed that we only have maybe 3 people in the whole group who are really comfortable with packet under pressure, everyone else kind of freezes up when the software doesnt cooperate.

curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises recently and what surprised you or what you wish you'd practiced more beforehand. we're already talking about doing a tabletop before the next one to work through some of the procedural stuff

yeah the net discipline thing is SO real. we had almost the exact same issue during our last RACES activation drill — not even a full SET, just a check-in exercise — and still had people double-keying and one guy who kept giving his call sign in the wrong part of his transmission. like, he'd been licensed for 15 years too so it wasn't a new ham thing, it's just that people get nervous or excited and the basics go out the window.

the tabletop idea is good, we started doing those about twice a year and it genuinely helps, especially for the ICS form stuff because people can actually slow down and look at the forms without the pressure of trying to relay actual traffic at the same time. we use some old after-action reports from real activations (not ours, just ones that got published) and walk through what decisions would have been made and why. gets people thinking in that mode before they're ever holding a mic during a real event.

one thing that really helped our group on the digital side was just doing a monthly winlink net, nothing fancy, everyone just sends a check-in message through the system. keeps people's hands in it so its not a total mystery when they need it for real. sounds obvious but we went like two years without doing it and the skill erosion was pretty noticeable

im pretty new to all this emcomm stuff, just got my general last spring and joined our local ARES group a few months ago. reading this is kind of intimidating honestly but also good to know that even experienced operators run into problems. i went through the ICS 100 and 200 online courses like they recommended but havent been to an actual exercise yet. is it pretty overwhelming the first time or is there usually someone kind of guiding you through it?