so i finally did my first SET with the local ARES group and honestly i thought i was more prepared than i was. been a ham for about 3 years, got my general last year, figured i knew enough to be useful in a real activation. the simulation was a scenario where a tornado had knocked out the county EOC's primary comms and we were supposed to relay health and welfare traffic between two shelters and the EOC.

first thing that bit me was i had no idea where my ICS forms were. like i knew what ICS-213 was, i had done the online courses, but when someone handed me a message to log i was digging around in my go bag for like 2 minutes and that felt really embarrassing in the moment. also my HT battery was at about 60% when i showed up which the net control guy pointed out pretty quickly, he was nice about it but noted that 60% is basically 0% in a long activation.

the other thing i didnt expect was how much dead air makes you second guess yourself. when traffic slows down you start wondering if you missed a check-in or if something happened. the experienced guys seemed totally comfortable with the silence but i kept wanting to key up just to confirm i was still in the net.

anyway curious if others have stories from their first SET or any drills where something caught them off guard. feels like you cant really learn this stuff from a book.

oh man the battery thing is so real. i made that exact mistake in my second activation, not a sim, an actual severe weather watch where we ended up being deployed for about 11 hours. showed up with my main HT on maybe 70% because i figured i'd charged it the week before. learned real fast to just have a rule that you charge everything the night before, every time, no exceptions. i keep a sticky note on my go bag lid that says CHARGE and still check it twice.

the ICS forms thing is a learning curve too. a lot of people know the theory but never actually practice filling one out under any kind of time pressure. our group started doing monthly tabletop drills just for paperwork flow and it sounds boring but it made a huge difference. you get muscle memory for where everything lives and how to phrase things in standard format. the dead air anxiety goes away eventually, probably took me 4 or 5 real activations before i stopped interpreting silence as something being wrong. net control usually has way more going on than you realize and sometimes silence just means things are quiet which is actually good news during an emergency.

yeah the first SET is always a bit of a wake up call, thats kind of the whole point of them honestly. better to figure out your gaps during a drill than when someone actually needs help. i remeber my first one we had a guy show up with a radio he hadnt tested on the repeater frequency we were using and spent the first 20 minutes troubleshooting a PL tone issue while the rest of us were already taking traffic. he was mortified but we all laughed about it later and he never made that mistake again.

one thing i'd suggest is after the SET your group should do a hot wash, some groups call it an AAR, where everyone sits down and talks through what worked and what didnt without anyone getting defensive about it. the best groups i've worked with treat every drill failure as a gift because it's free information. the ones that just pack up and go home without debriefing tend to make the same mistakes over and over.