so i've had my technician for about 8 months and kept seeing ARES mentioned on this forum and at the club and finally just went to one of their monthly meetings last tuesday. honestly wasnt sure what to expect, i thought it might be a bunch of guys sitting around talking about radios which yeah there was some of that but it was actually way more organized than i figured.

they went over their ICS structure which i had zero knowledge about before, and the EC talked about how they interface with the county emergency manager and what kinds of activations they've done in the past few years. apparently last summer they helped with communications during a pretty bad flooding situation when cell infrastructure was down. that part really got my attention.

my question is kind of basic but — do i need my general to be really useful in ARES or is tech enough for most of what they do locally? i dont want to volunteer for something and then find out i cant do half the activations because of license limitations. also they mentioned something called AUXCOMM which i havent looked into yet, anyone know if thats different from ARES or kind of the same thing?

Tech is honestly plenty to get started, most local ARES groups operate heavily on VHF/UHF which is fully within your priveleges. I've been with our county ARES group for about six years now and the majority of our activations are on 2m simplex or our local repeater network — no HF needed at all for most of it. Where HF becomes useful is for longer haul stuff or when you're working with state-level nets, but that's usually handled by the operators who've been around a while anyway.

AUXCOMM is kind of a broader term, it basically refers to any auxiliary communications support for public safety — ARES falls under that umbrella in most places but AUXCOMM is more of a FEMA/government framework thing. Your EC would be the best person to explain how your specific group fits into it because it varies a lot by county and state. Just go to a few more meetings and do the IS-100 and IS-700 courses on the FEMA site, those are usually required before you can actually activate and they're free and not too long.

yeah tech is fine dont stress about it. when i joined our ARES group i was a tech for like another year before i upgraded and nobody cared, i was doing health and welfare traffic at a marathon and helping with net check-ins the whole time. general opens up more doors eventually but dont let it stop you from getting involved now.

the ICS stuff tripped me up too at first, it sounds way more complicated than it is. once you do a drill or two it clicks pretty fast.