so we finally did our annual SET last saturday and honestly it went better than i expected but also way worse in some spots than i thought it would. we had about 14 operators show up which is pretty solid for our group, set up a net control at the EOC and had three remote stations out in the field simulating shelter operations.

the thing that really caught us off guard was how fast the message traffic backed up. we were doing ICS-213 forms over packet and within like 45 minutes the buffer at net control was just completely overwhelmed because one of our guys at the shelter sim didnt realize he was supposed to hold traffic until net control was ready. so we had this cascade of messages all hitting at once and nobody had a clear picture of what was handled and what wasnt. took a good 20 minutes to sort it out and in a real event that kind of confusion could actually matter.

the other thing we noticed is that most of our newer folks have never actually had to deal with a formal net, like with proper prowords and everything. they're used to just chatting on the repeater and when you throw them into a structured net with actual traffic they kind of freeze up or start free-forming their transmissions. not their fault really, we probably need to do more training exercises before the big yearly test instead of just throwing everyone in cold.

anyway curious if anyone else has done a SET recently and what kind of things tripped your group up. always feel like i learn more from what goes wrong than what goes right.

yeah the traffic management piece gets everyone the first couple times. we had basically the same thing happen at our SET maybe three years ago, except ours was voice traffic and someone just kept calling in with new messages while net control was still trying to log the previous one. coordinator finally had to just call a net pause which feels awkward but honestly it worked.

what we ended up doing after that was adding a really simple acknowledgment step - net control has to explicitly say "ready for traffic" before anyone sends, and if you dont hear that you just wait. sounds obvious but when you write it down in a quick reference card and hand it to every operator before the exercise it actually makes a big difference. the new folks especially, they just need that physical card to look at when they get flustered.

the prowords thing is real too. we run a monthly simplex net specifically so people can practice structured communication before we ever get to anything resembling a real activation. low stakes, no pressure, just practice. might be worth pitching to your EC if you havent already.

this is actually really good to read because im about to do my first SET with our group next month and im kind of nervous about the formal net stuff. i know the basics but when people start throwing out prowords fast i lose track. is there like a standard cheat sheet you guys use or does every group kind of make their own thing