so i finally got off my butt and participated in one of the county ARES exercises after being a member for like two years and just never actually showing up to anything. i was pretty confident going in, i mean ive been licensed for six years, run a decent station, figured id have no problems.

yeah not quite how it went. the scenario was a simulated earthquake, EOC gets activated, we're supposed to establish comms between three shelter locations and the EOC using nothing but simplex HF and VHF because we assumed the repeaters were down. first thing that happened is i completely blanked on net control procedure when it was my turn to check in. like just totally froze up. i know this stuff in theory but when there's an actual person on the other end timing you and the whole net is waiting... different story.

also the ICS paperwork stuff caught me way off guard. i had done the online courses years ago and kind of forgot most of it. the served agency guys were pretty patient about it but i could tell they were used to people showing up underprepared.

anyone else have a similar wake up call at their first real drill? and is there a good way to practice the net control side of things without waiting for the next official exercise? feels like that's really where i fell apart.

oh man this brings back memories. my first activation wasnt even a drill it was an actual windstorm event and i had the same deer-in-headlights moment when net control asked me to relay a message and i had to ask them to repeat it twice because i was writing too slow. nobody made me feel bad about it but i definitely drove home that night thinking i needed to actually practice not just study.

the thing that helped me most was volunteering to be net control on our local weekly 2m net. even though its just a check-in net and pretty low stakes, you still have to manage the flow, handle lids who talk over each other, log things in real time. after doing that for a few months the procedural stuff started to feel automatic. ICS wise honestly just pull up ICS 213 forms and practice filling them out while listening to a net, pretend you're relaying what you hear. sounds silly but it builds the muscle memory.

the fact that you showed up at all puts you way ahead of half the roster on most ARES groups lol

yeah the gap between knowing the theory and actually doing it under any kind of pressure is real. i think a lot of hams dont realize how much of emcomm is just practiced habits more than technical knowledge. the radio part is usually the easy bit.

our group does a tabletop exercise every few months which helps fill in some of that gap between full activations. its not the same as being on the air but at least you work through the ICS stuff and think about how messages actually flow up and down the chain. might be worth asking your EC if theyd be open to something like that if they dont already do it.