so i finally participated in my first SET (simulated emergency test) with our local ARES group and honestly it was a lot more humbling than i thought it would be. i've been licensed about two years now, mostly just rag chewing and some local nets, and i figured hey how hard can it be right

well. a few things caught me off guard. first was just how much traffic volume hits you when things get going - like everyone needs to pass a message at once and suddenly you're trying to copy ICS-213 forms over a noisy 2m repeater while someone's HT is clearly overdeviated and there's a kerchunk from who knows where. my logging fell apart pretty fast, i had pen and paper but wasnt writing fast enough and started missing info in the preamble

second thing was how much i relied on the repeater without even thinking about it. we had a scenario where we simulated repeater failure and had to go simplex and suddenly half the group couldnt hear each other. i couldnt hear the net control at all from my mobile, had to reposition the car twice before i got a workable signal

anyway the debrief afterward was actually really valuable - the EC went through everything that went wrong without making anyone feel bad about it which i appreciated. just wondering if anyone else has done these exercises and what suprised them the most the first time through

yeah the simplex thing gets everyone the first time. we did an exercise a few years back where we intentionally took the repeater "offline" about 20 minutes in and it was honestly a little chaotic at first. people just froze up because they'd never actually practiced working without it. the muscle memory of just hitting the button and talking to everyone doesn't prepare you for suddenly having to think about terrain and antenna polarization and whether that hilltop node is even reachable from where you're parked

the logging speed thing is real too. i always recommend people practice copying traffic on the weekly nets even when it feels like overkill. doesnt matter if the message is just a welfare message to nobody in particular - just running through the format over and over so your hand knows what to do. the Winlink stuff helps some people but i'm still a big believer in being able to do it on paper when everything else falls apart

sounds like you got a good EC running things over there. the debrief is honestly where half the learning happens and some groups skip it or rush through it which is a shame

the overdeviated HT thing drives me crazy, we have the same problem at every exercise lol. nobody checks their audio levels beforehand and then net control is sitting there trying to decode mush

one thing that helped me personally was doing the traffic nets on HF during the week, not just local VHF stuff. when you've copied a message through static and QSB a few times you stop panicking when conditions aren't perfect