so i passed my general last spring and joined the local ARES group mostly because my elmer kept saying it was a good way to actually use the hobby for something meaningful. been going to the monthly nets and a few of the tabletop exercises but next weekend is my first real activation — county emergency management asked us to provide comms support for a marathon event, not a disaster or anything but still an actual deployment with actual served agency folks expecting us to not screw up.

my EC has been great about walking me through the ICS stuff and i did the IS-100 and IS-700 online courses like they asked but honestly sitting at a table with a radio in an EOC with real coordinators around me is gonna be way different than a practice net from my car. anyone else remember their first activation and have any tips? im mostly worried about keeping my net control log accurate and not freezing up when i call in a report. been practicing phonetics in the shower which my wife thinks is hilarious

ha the phonetics in the shower thing is very real, my neighbor probably thought i was losing it when i first started. anyway first activation jitters are completely normal and honestly the marathon events are a pretty forgiving environment to start with — youre mostly doing welfare traffic and position updates, nothing life or death, so if you fumble a callsign or have to ask for a repeat nobody is gonna care.

biggest thing i'd say is dont be afraid to ask net control to say again if you miss something. better to ask twice than to log it wrong. also bring more snacks than you think you need because you might be out there longer than the schedule says and a hungry ham is a distracted ham. keep a paper log even if they have you on some digital system like ARES Connect or whatever, just in case. and honestly once you key up that first time the nerves kind of melt away. you got this.

yeah what he said. i remember my first one was a flood watch deployment and i was so focused on not messing up that i forgot to actually listen to what net control was saying, ended up having to ask for a repeat like three times on the same transmission which felt embarrassing but nobody cared at all. the served agency folks honestly just want to know someone is there with a radio working, they're not grading your technique.

one thing that helped me early on was writing out a little cheat sheet with my assigned frequency, my tactical call if they gave me one, and the format for whatever reports I was supposed to send. just a folded up index card in my shirt pocket. sounds dumb but when youre tired and people are asking you things it's nice to have something to glance at