so ive been a licensed ham for about 8 months now (general class) and i joined my local ARES group back in the spring mostly because i wanted to do something useful with the hobby instead of just calling CQ into the void. did a couple of the training nets and the SET exercise back in october which was mostly just check-ins and passing some simulated health and welfare traffic, nothing crazy.

anyway they just activated us for real to support the county emergency management office during the flooding that's been going on. nothing like a full disaster situation but the EOC wanted some extra comms support and our EC called us up. im set up for this in theory — i have my go-bag with a Yaesu FT-60 and a roll of coax and a mag mount, laptop with Winlink Express, all the stuff they told us to bring to the exercises. but actually doing it for real has me second guessing everything. like what if i forget something or mess up a message or dont understand a net control instruction.

anybody else felt like this their first real activation? did it just kind of click once you were actually there or was it a rough learning curve?

oh man i remember my first one, it was a marathon race support thing not even a real emergency but i was so anxious about it i showed up like an hour early and just sat in my car going over my notes. once the net actually opened up and net control started calling stations it was honestly way less stressful than the training nets because everyone is focused and the pacing is slower and more deliberate. the muscle memory from the training really does kick in.

the one thing i'd say is dont be afraid to ask net control to say again if you miss something. everyone expects some hiccups on the first real go and a good net control would rather you ask than guess. also make sure your batteries are charged the night before, i forgot to do that once and had a rough first hour running off a car adapter while my main battery caught up. you'll be fine though, showing up is honestly 80 percent of it.

yeah what he said, the nerves are totally normal. i've done probably a dozen activations over the years and the first one always sticks with you. just trust your training and follow your EC's lead, they'll tell you where to be and what to do and you just execute. the EOC folks are usually pretty patient with the radio side of things too, they just want the comms to work and they're not judging your technique.

one thing that helped me early on was keeping a simple paper log even when i was also doing Winlink, just so i had something to fall back on if the laptop decided to do something weird. which it will at some point, always does