so we finally got enough people together to run a half-day SET and honestly it was kind of humbling. we've been doing weekly nets for a couple years now and i figured we had a pretty good handle on things but actually simulating a real disaster scenario made it obvious real fast where the gaps are.

the scenario was a prolonged power outage across the county after a major storm, EOC is up but several shelter sites need to be activated and we need to get traffic moving between them and the hospitals. sounds straightforward right. well about 20 minutes in we realized that three of our operators at the shelter sites had never actually done formal traffic handling, like they knew nets but not NTS-style formatted messages and it just kind of fell apart a little. not badly but enough that you could see how in a real event it would create problems downstream.

the other thing that surprised me was propagation — we'd planned to use a local repeater as the backbone but we had two shadow zones where HTs basically couldnt hit it reliably and nobody had thought through a workaround. we ended up improvising a linked cross-band setup which worked but that shouldn't be improvised during an actual emergency.

anyway curious if anyone else has done these and what kind of stuff caught you off guard the first time. we're already talking about doing another one focused on go-kit interoperability since everyone showed up with wildly different equipment

yeah the traffic handling thing is such a common gap, we ran into exactly the same issue about three years ago. a lot of people come up through the repeater net culture where it's pretty loose and conversational and then when you throw an ICS 213 equivalent at them they freeze up a bit. what ended up helping us a lot was running a dedicated traffic net every couple weeks just so people got comfortable with the format before they needed it under pressure.

the repeater shadow zone thing is worth doing a real survey on if you havent already. we actually drove around the county with a signal meter and logged the dead spots and it was eye opening. ended up identifying two hilltop sites where a portable digipeater or a simplex relay station would plug most of the gaps. that map has been one of the most useful planning documents we have now. if your group hasnt done a formal coverage survey i'd really push for it before the next exercise, makes the conversation a lot more concrete than just guessing

this is making me want to get more involved with our local ARES group honestly. ive been licensed for about a year and a half and i keep meaning to show up to meetings but life gets in the way. the go-kit interoperability thing you mentioned is something i wonder about too — like i have a basic setup but i have no idea if it would actually play nice with what everyone else is running. do most groups have like a standard config you're supposed to follow or is it kind of whatever people bring