so i've been doing ARES stuff for about two years now but this was my first time actually participating in a full SET (simulated emergency test) where our county EOC was actually involved and they had real staff there pretending to need our help with shelter comms and resource tracking. i thought i was pretty prepared honestly, had my go-bag dialed in, knew my frequencies, had backup power sorted out.

what i did NOT expect was how chaotic the net control situation got when two different people thought they were running the net at the same time. like nobody's fault really it was just a coordination breakdown at the start and it took probably 15 minutes to sort out who had actual authority. we lost a lot of simulated time on that. also my logging was way behind because i was trying to do too much at once — handle traffic AND keep an accurate log. should have had a dedicated logger with me.

the thing that stuck with me most though was when they threw in a curveball around hour three — simulated that repeater went down and we had to shift to simplex. half the team wasn't sure what our backup simplex frequency was supposed to be. we had it written in our plan but nobody had it memorized or easily accessible. so that's something i'm pushing for us to fix before the next exercise.

anyone else been through stuff like this? what are the lessons that surprised you the most when you actually got into a real drill or deployment?

yeah the dual net control thing is a really common problem, seen it happen more than once. the fix that worked for our group was making sure there's always a clearly designated primary AND a backup listed in writing before the exercise even starts, and everyone acknowledges it on the net at the very beginning. sounds obvious but it genuinely makes a difference.

the simplex frequency thing is huge too. we actually laminated a small card that goes in every go-bag with our primary, secondary, and simplex fallback plus the PL tones for all our local repeaters. took maybe an afternoon to make and it's saved us a lot of fumbling around. honestly the best drills are the ones where things go wrong because thats where you find the gaps in your plan. sounds like you got a lot out of it even if it felt messy in the moment.

the logging thing you mentioned -- that got me. i tried to do a solo deployment at a small community event last year just to get practice and i was absolutely drowning trying to track ICS213 traffic AND maintain a station log AND monitor two different frequencies. never again without a second person at minimum. some people use a tablet app for logging now which speeds things up but you still need eyes and hands free to actually operate.

also dont underestimate how weird it feels to do formal traffic handling under pressure when there's real officials watching. completely different vibe from just doing it with your club on a wednesday night net.