so ive been checking into our local ARES net on 146.940 every tuesday night for about three months now and honestly its one of the things that got me way more into this hobby than i expected. started doing it just to get my feet wet and now i look forward to it every week. the net control guys are super patient and it doesnt matter if your signal is a little rough or whatever.

anyway i was wondering if other people here are active on any nets regularly, like weekly or monthly check-ins, special event stuff, anything like that. also curious if anyone knows of any good national or regional nets that welcome newer hams. i have HF now too (finally got my General back in march) so maybe something on 40m or 80m would be cool to try. heard the traffic nets can be kind of intimidating but maybe im overthinking it

Traffic nets are really not as scary as they sound, I promise. The NTS nets on 80m especially tend to have really experienced net controls who will walk you through sending a formal message if you've never done it. I'd look up the Pacific or Eighth Area nets depending on where you are, they run in the evenings most days. The 40m ones can get noisy depending on conditions but 80m is usually pretty solid after sunset for regional stuff.

Also the 10-10 net if you get your HF legs under you, thats a fun one. Not super formal but you get a number and people actually keep track. Good way to work a lot of stations without it feeling like a contest. Anyway yeah just jump in, worst case the NCS asks you to repeat and thats fine, happens to everyone.

same boat as you honestly, i just started checking into a net like two months ago and it feels way more like a community than just random QSOs. ours is a Sunday evening thing on a local repeater and half the time we end up just chatting after the formal check-in part is done lol. one thing i didnt know at first was that some nets have a specific format for how you give your callsign and info so it might be worth listning for a few weeks before jumping in just to get the flow of it