so last weekend was my first actual activation with our county ARES group, we had a pretty big weather event come through and the county EOC requested us for net control backup and liaison to the Red Cross shelter down the road. i've been through all the ICS training, done the SET exercises, thought i was pretty prepared but man actually sitting in the EOC with real served agency people asking you questions is a whole different thing.

couple things i noticed that nobody really warned me about — first, the EOC staff barely knows what we do or how we operate, like the emergency manager kept asking if we could just patch into the phone system, had to explain a few times that it doesnt quite work like that. second, the ICS paperwork stuff (213s, 214s) is way more important than i thought during training, they actually wanted our logs in real time which i wasnt totally ready for.

the actual radio work was honestly the easy part, 2m simplex between the shelter and EOC worked great, we even had to relay a few messages when the shelter net control had trouble with a portable. just curious if anyone else had similar experiences their first time out, or things that caught you off guard

yeah that gap between training and actual activation is real and i dont think theres a way to fully close it until you just do it. our group does tabletop exercises with the actual county EM staff now partly for that reason, so they get a feel for what we can and cant do before anything real happens. the phone patch thing comes up constantly, people assume ham radio is basically a telephone for emergencies and it takes a while to reset those expectations.

the 214 thing is spot on too. i basically had to rebuild my logging habits after my first activation because i was used to casual net logging, not the kind of accountability a served agency actually needs. some guys in our group keep a pre-filled ICS form template on a clipboard so they're not scrambling. might be worth asking your EC if the group has anything like that for the next one.

sounds like it went well overall though, first activation with real stakes is a good confidence builder once you get through it

congrats on getting through your first one, thats honestly more than a lot of licensed hams ever do. i remember mine was a marathon event and i mostly just handled check-ins but even that felt intense with everything else going on around you at the EOC.

one thing i'd add — dont get discouraged if the served agency relationship feels a little awkward at first, it takes a few activations and honestly just showing up to the non-emergency stuff (health and safety fairs, public service events) before they really start to trust you as a resource. the EM in our county barely acknowledged us for like two years and now she specifically requests us and knows half our callsigns by name, so it does get better