so i just got my general a few months back and someone at the club mentioned ARES and that our county group meets monthly so i figured id check it out. went last tuesday and it was actually a lot more organized than i expected? they had like a net check in, talked about some upcoming training exercises, and there was a guy doing a presentation on ICS which went way over my head honestly.

my question is kind of vague i guess but like... what does actually getting involved look like. do they just call you when something happens or is there a bunch of training you have to do first. i dont want to show up at some disaster scene and have no idea what im doing. also someone mentioned RACES which i thought was the same thing but apparently its different? still a little fuzzy on that distinction

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. so ARES and RACES do overlap a lot and honestly in a lot of counties they basically function as the same group of people, the difference is more about the legal/organizational structure. RACES is specifically tied to government emergency management and only gets activated through official channels, whereas ARES is the ARRL-affiliated volunteer side and can be activated by served agencies like hospitals or red cross without a full government declaration. in practice most of us hold both registrations and just show up when needed.

as for getting involved, dont stress too much about the ICS stuff right away, everyone starts confused by it. the main thing is to keep showing up to meetings and nets, get your name known, and do the FEMA online courses when you have time — IS-100 and IS-700 are the usual starting points and theyre free. after a few months of being a familiar face youll start getting included in the tabletop exercises and eventually real deployments. nobody expects a new general to walk in knowing everything, the good groups are pretty patient about it

yeah what the other guy said about the FEMA courses is spot on, do those sooner rather than later. i procrastinated on them for like two years and then felt kinda dumb when everyone kept referencing ICS concepts during activations and i was just nodding along pretending i understood.

one thing i'd add — find out if your group does any actual go-kit building sessions or field exercises. some ARES groups are really active with drills and simulated emergencies and others mostly just talk about it at meetings. the hands on stuff is where you actually learn whether your equipment works and whether you can set up under pressure. my first real deployment was during flooding a couple years back and i was really glad id done a few drills beforehand because even simple stuff like logging traffic properly under stress is harder than it sounds