so last weekend we had an actual activation for the flooding that hit the county over near the fairgrounds area and it was my first real one not just a drill and wow. i've been to like four or five RACES exercises and thought i was pretty prepared but there's just something different when its actually happening and people are stressed and the EC is on the radio every five minutes asking for status updates.

my assignment was just to be a liaison at the secondary EOC which sounds easy but the net control kept switching frequencies on me and i didnt have the backup simplex frequencies written down anywhere because i assumed my HT memory channels had everything. spoiler: they did not. lesson learned there for sure.

the actual comms worked out fine in the end, we passed a lot of welfare traffic and i got to work with a couple guys ive only ever seen at the monthly meetings. but i keep thinking about all the small stuff i wasnt ready for, like how long the shifts actually go and not having enough food, and just the general chaos of people walking up to you asking questions you have no idea how to answer because youre just the radio guy.

anyone else remember their first activation and feeling kind of overwhelmed? does it get easier or do you just get better at faking it

yeah it absolutely gets easier but that feeling never fully goes away and honestly i think thats a good thing. keeps you sharp. my first one was a search and rescue assist back maybe 12 years ago now and i showed up with my go bag and realized i had packed three different coax adapters but forgot a notepad. a literal notepad. had to borrow paper from a firefighter which was a little embarrassing.

the frequency thing you mentioned is a real common one, i've seen experienced operators get caught out by that too especially when the IC decides to go off script. what a lot of our group does now is laminate a small card with the primary and all backup freqs including the national simplex calling freq and just zip tie it to the HT or go bag strap. low tech but it works. also if your group doesnt already do ICS-205 forms for every exercise make sure they do, because having that sheet in front of you during a real event is genuinely useful and not just paperwork busywork.

sounds like you did fine though, the fact that you were paying attention to what went wrong means youll be better next time.

haha the food thing gets everyone. i packed way too much water and like zero actual food for a 10 hour shift one time and was basically running on vending machine coffee by hour six. not ideal when you need to concentrate on traffic handling.

one thing that helped me a lot was just doing more ICS training online, the FEMA stuff is free and some of it is actually pretty practical for understanding why the EOC people are acting the way they are. once you kind of get the incident command structure it makes more sense why your EC seems frantic, theyre usually juggling a lot more than just our net.