so i've been licensed for about 8 months now (General class) and i kept seeing ARES mentioned on here and elsewhere and finally found my local group and went to a meeting last tuesday. pretty cool honestly, way more organized than i expected. they do a net every wednesday night and apparently have some kind of relationship with the county emergency management office.

my question is kind of twofold i guess. first - is training pretty standard across groups or does every county/region do their own thing? because the EC there mentioned ICS-100 and ICS-200 as basically required before you can activate and i wasnt sure if thats an ARRL thing or a local rule they made up. second - how long does it typically take before you're actually useful at a real activation, like realistically. i dont want to show up somewhere during an actual emergency and just be in the way.

anyway the people were really welcoming which was nice, one guy there has been doing this since the 80s which is kind of wild to think about

the ICS stuff is pretty much universal at this point, not just a local quirk. FEMA pushed hard for all volunteer groups including amateur radio to get at least 100 and 200 done, and a lot of served agencies wont even let you in the door without it. some groups also want IS-700 which is the NIMS intro course. all of it is free online through the FEMA EMI site so no reason not to just knock it out over a few weekends.

as for being useful - honestly it depends a lot on what the activation is. something like a planned event (marathon, parade, that kind of thing) you can be helpful pretty quick because its low pressure and you can shadow someone. a real no-notice emergency is different, thats where having done the training nets and exercises really pays off. if you're running the wednesday night net regularly and doing the tabletops and simulated emergency tests when they come up, youll be surprised how fast things click. i'd say a year of active participation and you'll feel a lot more confident. maybe sooner depending on the person

yeah what he said about ICS. just do the courses they really dont take that long and some of them are actually kind of interesting once you get into the incident command structure stuff. our group also does a SET every fall which is the Simulated Emergency Test that ARRL runs, thats a good low stakes way to see how things actually work without it being a real thing.

one thing nobody told me when i joined - bring a notebook to every net and activation. sounds dumb but keeping a log of traffic and times is like half the job sometimes and its easy to space on that when youre new and focused on the radio stuff