so we finally did our county SET last saturday and honestly it was a real eye opener. we had maybe 14 operators show up which is better than last year but we still had some pretty significant gaps when things started to get complicated in the scenario.

the scenario was basically a prolonged power outage combined with a communications failure at the EOC — nothing too exotic, the kind of thing that actually happens. what caught us off guard was how quickly the net control situation got messy when we had three different served agencies all trying to check in at the same time and nobody had really established clear priority traffic procedures ahead of time. i mean we had them written down somewhere but under even mild simulated pressure people kind of forgot.

the other thing that got me was battery power. we talk about this constantly at meetings but when it came time to actually run on battery for the full four hour exercise, two of our operators ran low way sooner than expected because they hadnt actually tested their setups under real load before. one guy had a great radio but was running a tiny little gel cell that had been sitting in his trunk for probably two years. lesson learned the hard way i guess.

curious if other groups have found good ways to build traffic priority into muscle memory during training, or if there are tabletop exercises that work better than doing full SET style activations for that kind of thing. we want to do quarterly drills this year instead of just the annual one.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone eventually. we had almost the exact same issue during a winlink drill we ran a couple winters back — operators who swore their setup was good and then couldn't sustain even modest HF digital traffic for more than an hour or two. what we started doing after that is requiring every operator to do a timed battery rundown test at home before any activation or exercise and just report their results to the EC. nothing formal, just hey i ran my station for three hours on battery, here's roughly what i drew and how the voltage held up. it got people actually paying attention to their power situation instead of assuming everything was fine.

on the priority traffic thing, we've had decent luck with a really simple laminated card that lives in the go kit with the net control script. just three tiers, emergency, priority, routine, with a one sentence description of each. sounds dumb but when you're tired or stressed your brain really does just want a thing to look at. the best muscle memory drill we found was doing short 30 minute tabletops on simplex where net control has to deal with overlapping check-ins — you can do that from your kitchen basically.

this is making me think i should actually check my own battery before i show up and look like that guy with the dead gel cell haha. im pretty new to ARES stuff, just got my general last spring, and watching the SET from the sidelines made me realize theres a lot of procedural stuff i just dont know yet. like i understood the radio part fine but the net control scripting and the ICS forms and all that — it felt like everyone else had a shared language i hadnt learned yet. do most groups do any kind of intro training for newer members or is it mostly just learn by doing