so we finally got around to doing a full SET with our county ARES group and honestly it was kind of humbling. we had maybe 14 operators show up which is better than i expected but man the first hour was rough. the net control station kept getting walked over because people werent waiting for their turn, and we had at least two guys who hadnt updated their ICS forms in like three years so the served agency contact info was completely wrong.

the scenario was a fictional flooding event that cut off the EOC from the hospital and two shelters. in theory we had enough people to cover all the positions but in practice we didnt really account for operators who arent comfortable with formal net procedures. a couple of the newer folks kind of froze up when it got busy which totally makes sense, nobody wants to mess up in front of everyone, but it showed we need to do more practice runs before the real thing.

the thing that actually worked well was our simplex fallback plan. when we pretended the repeater went down (just had everyone switch to the designated simplex freq) most people made the switch cleanly and we kept traffic moving. that part felt good. also our digital guys had Winlink set up and got a message through to the state EOC which was cool to see actually work under simulated conditions.

anyway just sharing because i think sometimes we only hear about the successes and not the messy reality of how these things actually go. curious if anyone else has done a SET recently and what caught you off guard

yeah the ICS paperwork thing gets everyone. we did ours back in the spring and same deal, half our ICS-309s had the wrong frequencies listed because someone updated the band plan and didnt tell the forms guy. its one of those things that seems like a small admin detail until you actually need it.

the part about newer operators freezing up is really real though. what we started doing is running really low stakes practice nets every couple months, like not even pretending its an emergency, just doing formal check-ins and passing traffic so people get comfortable with the rhythm of it before theres any pressure. seemed to help a lot. the first time someone hears net control say "go ahead with your traffic" in a real SET it shouldnt also be the first time they've had to respond under any kind of formality at all.

sounds like your simplex planning paid off though, thats honestly the thing that trips up a lot of groups. glad the Winlink piece worked too, we had a nightmare with that a couple years ago where the gateway was down and nobody had a backup path configured.

this is really interesting to read, im just starting to get involved with our local ARES group and havent done a SET yet. is it pretty common for the first one to go kind of rough like this or do more experienced groups run them pretty smoothly? also what does the debrief process look like afterward, do you do a formal AAR or is it more just talking through what happened