so i finally got around to joining our local ARES group and theres a drill this saturday morning. EC said to bring my HT and be ready for some message passing but honestly im not sure what that means exactly. ive been licensed for about 8 months but mostly just ragchew on 2m repeaters

anyone remember their first drill? dont want to look like a complete newbie even though i kinda am when it comes to emergency stuff

oh man my first drill was a mess lol. showed up with my little baofeng and everyone else had these fancy radios i'd never seen before. but dont worry about it - the whole point is to learn. they'll probably have you practice copying traffic messages in the proper format which is different than regular conversation. bring a notepad and pen for sure, and maybe a clipboard if you have one. most ARES folks are pretty patient with new people

Good for you joining up! The message handling is probably going to be radiogram format - its got specific fields like precedence, message number, all that stuff. Your EC should walk you through it but you might want to look up ARRL radiogram format online beforehand just so you're not completely lost. And yeah definitely bring paper and something to write on, you'll be copying a lot of text.