so i finally got called up for an actual activation last weekend, not just a drill. county EOC needed backup comms for a flooding situation over on the east side and our ARES group got the call saturday morning around 6am. i've been doing the weekly nets and the SET exercises for about two years now and honestly was starting to wonder if any of it would ever amount to a real deployment.

glad i kept at it though because when it actually happened i felt way more prepared than i expected. the ICS stuff they make you do, the IS-100 and IS-200 courses, i kind of rolled my eyes at all that paperwork stuff when i was going through it but having a actual incident commander to report to and knowing how to pass traffic in the right format made everything just... work. nobody was stepping on each other, information was actually getting where it needed to go.

one thing that caught me off guard was how much time you spend just waiting and monitoring. i think i was expecting it to feel more hectic but mostly it was long stretches of listening and making sure you were ready when needed. also my jump kit which i thought was totally dialed in had like three things i wished i had and two things i never touched. gonna have to rethink that.

anyway if anybody here is on the fence about joining their local ARES group or thinks the training is kind of tedious, i'd say stick with it. the repetition is the point i guess.

that's really cool to hear, congrats on your first real one. i've been part of our county RACES group for about eight years and the waiting thing never really goes away lol. during a bad ice storm we had a few winters back i think i sat at a repeater site for almost four hours just monitoring before they needed anything from us. but that's kind of the job right, being there in case.

the jump kit thing is something our group actually does a whole session on now because everybody shows up with different stuff and half of it is wrong for the situation. we had a guy bring a massive linear amp to a deployment once, like what are you doing with that. we sort of landed on a standard list for our area which helps, though people still customize. whats in yours that you found you were missing if you dont mind me asking, always curious what gaps people find

ive been meaning to look into the local ARES group for a while now, just got my general last spring and wasnt sure if i had enough experience to be useful. does it matter that im still pretty new? i dont want to show up and be more of a liability than anything