so we finally did a full SET with our county ARES group and honestly it was a humbling experience. we simulated a major flood event cutting off the main EOC from several shelter locations and the idea was to establish and maintain comms using only simplex and a couple of linked repeaters that were running on backup power.

what i didnt expect was how fast things fell apart when people started freelancing on frequencies. we had three different operators all trying to net control at the same time during the first 20 minutes because nobody was totally clear on who had that role when the primary NC lost comms temporarily. it was chaos, good chaos i guess because we learned from it, but chaos.

the other big thing was message handling. we had a few newer hams who had never actually passed formal traffic before and when we started doing ICS-213 style messages over voice it slowed everything way down. not their fault at all, we just hadnt drilled that enough beforehand.

the stuff that actually worked well was the go-kit operators at the shelter sites, they were solid. and the NVIS setup one of our elmers brought worked way better than i thought it would for county-wide coverage when the repeaters were being flaky.

anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what tripped you up the most. we're trying to build a better pre-exercise training program so any lessons learned from your end would be really helpful.

yeah the net control confusion thing is super common and honestly it happens even to groups that have been doing this for years. we had almost the exact same situation during a tabletop we ran two winters ago except ours fell apart because our backup NC hadnt been told he was the backup NC — like he knew he was on the roster but nobody had actually briefed him on what that meant in practice. after that we started doing a short 5 minute briefing right before any activation or drill where we physically point at people and say "you're primary, you're secondary, you're tertiary" and repeat it out loud. sounds dumb but it made a huge difference.

the message handling thing is real too. ICS-213 over voice is a skill that takes actual repetition and most people dont realize that until they're fumbling through it live. we built it into our monthly nets now, just do one or two practice messages each time even when nothing is going on, keeps people sharp.

the NVIS comment caught my eye — what antenna were you running for that? we've been trying to figure out a good portable NVIS option for our group and keep going back and forth on whether a simple dipole at low height is enough or if we need something fancier. our county is pretty spread out so repeater-only coverage has always been a weak point for us during actual events when infrastructure takes hits.