so i've been an ARES member for about 8 months now, went to all the nets, did the IS-100 and IS-700 training online, showed up to a couple exercises but nothing real had come up in my area yet. well that changed last weekend when we had some pretty serious flooding and the county EOC actually called us in.

i want to say first off that all the training stuff actually does matter, like i was skeptical about some of the ICS paperwork stuff but when you're actually in the EOC and the EC is asking for an ICS-214 at the end of your shift it makes sense why they drilled that into us. the net control discipline stuff too — there were a few moments where people were stepping on each other and you could really feel how fast things can go sideways without proper procedure.

my main takeaway though is that my go-bag was not as ready as i thought it was. i had my HT and a spare battery but i ended up being there for about 11 hours and was really glad someone else had a longer antenna and a way to charge things. also the repeater we rely on locally lost power for about 2 hours and we had to shift to simplex which, honestly, not everyone knew the plan for that.

anyway just sharing in case anyone else is kind of on the fence about whether ARES training is worth the time. for me it turned out to be pretty worth it. curious if others have had similar first activation experiences

yeah the go-bag thing catches almost everyone the first time. i've been doing this for probably 12 years now and i still occasionally get to an activation and realize i forgot something dumb, last time it was just a notepad and pen which sounds silly until you're trying to log traffic with nothing to write on. the simplex fallback plan is something a lot of groups dont practice enough — it's one of those things that seems obvious until the repeater goes down and suddenly half the team is just... quiet on the air not sure what to do. glad your first one went well though, flooding events are no joke to work, they tend to go long and the situation keeps changing.

this is really helpful to read, im still working on getting my general and have been thinking about joining ARES once im a bit more comfortable on air. question — do they actually expect you to know a lot before joining or is it more of a learn as you go thing? i looked at the requirements and the online courses seem manageable but i wasnt sure how much actual radio experience you need before showing up to something like an activation