so i've been a ham for about two years now, got my general last spring, and i finally joined our county ARES group a few months back. been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training exercise but nothing real had come up yet.

well last weekend that changed. we had some pretty bad flooding in the area and the EOC got activated, and our EC called everyone in. i show up with my go bag and my ft-891 in the car and honestly i kind of froze up for the first few minutes because it was way busier than any training drill i'd been to. lots of people, the served agency folks were stressed, radio traffic was going constantly.

i ended up getting assigned to just log traffic at one of the stations which felt a little boring in the moment but looking back i think it was probably the right call for someone who hadn't done this before. by hour three i was comfortable enough that they let me actually handle some of the welfare traffic and i got the hang of ICS message format pretty quickly once i was doing it for real instead of just practicing.

anyway just wanted to share because i feel like nobody talks about how weird that first activation feels. like all the training is good but there's something about it being actual that just hits different. anyone else remember their first one?

yeah that logging assignment thing is super common for newer folks and honestly its one of the most important jobs at an activation, people underestimate it. accurate logs are what everyone falls back on when things get hectic and someone needs to know what was passed three hours ago. your EC probably put you there on purpose and not just to keep you busy.

my first activation was a wildfire support thing back in i think 2017 or so and i made the mistake of trying to do too much too fast, jumped on a frequency without checking in properly and stepped on another station. felt terrible about it. the training drills just dont fully replicate the pressure of a real event, you're right about that. the good news is it gets more natural pretty fast once you've had a real one under your belt. sounds like you handled it well though.

congrats on getting through it, the first real activation is definitely a thing. i remember mine felt almost surreal, like wait this is actually happening. one thing i'd suggest is after each activation write down a few notes for yourself about what worked and what you wish you'd had or done differently, even just in a text file somewhere. i started doing that and it really helped me improve my go bag setup over time, realized i kept forgetting stuff or bringing things i never used.