so i finally participated in a full SET exercise with my local ARES group and wow there was a lot more going on than i expected. for context i got my general about 8 months ago and joined the group mostly because i wanted to do something useful with the hobby beyond just ragchewing, which is fine but i wanted more structure i guess.

the scenario was a prolonged power outage affecting the county EOC and surrounding served agencies — hospitals, red cross shelter, that kind of thing. we had to stand up a net from scratch and pass simulated health-and-welfare traffic while also handling some ICS-213 message forms that had to get relayed to a neighboring county.

the biggest thing i took away honestly was how much slower everything goes when you're doing it for real (even simulated real) versus just talking on the repeater normally. we had a guy at the hospital site who kept breaking in out of turn, not his fault he's new, but it really showed how net discipline kind of falls apart under pressure. also our net control lost track of who had checked in maybe 20 minutes in and we had no backup log going. small thing but it snowballed.

curious if anyone else has done these and what caught you off guard the first time. feels like no matter how much you read about it you still learn something you didn't expect when it's actually happening.

yeah the net discipline thing is real. i've been doing ARES stuff for probably twelve years now and i still see it fall apart in exercises. the thing is most of our members only ever talk on the repeater in a very casual back and forth way and suddenly asking them to follow strict net protocol under stress is a completely different skill. it genuinely needs to be practiced seperately before you throw people into a simulated EOC activation.

the logging issue you mentioned is something we actually fixed in our group by assigning a dedicated logger at net control, not the net control op themselves. sounds obvious but for years our NCS was trying to do both and dropping things. once we split the roles it got way better. worth bringing up in your debrief if you havent already.

also dont get discouraged by how messy it felt. a SET that exposes nothing is a waste of time. the whole point is to find the gaps while the stakes are low.

i did my first one about two years back and the thing that got me was just the radio propagation being weird that day — like we had planned everything around the local repeater and then there was some kind of issue with the machine and suddenly people were trying to go simplex and half the portable stations couldnt hear each other. nobody had really thought through a contingency for that and it kind of exposed how much we were assuming the infrastructure would just work.

after that our EC made everyone practice simplex ops for like three meetings in a row which was honestly really good. not glamorous but super important.