So I finally got activated for a real event last weekend, not just a drill. There was a pretty bad storm system that came through and the county EOC asked our ARES group to staff the shelter over at the high school and provide comms backup in case anything went down with their repeater infrastructure.

I've been through like three SET exercises and a handful of nets but this was different. The pace was slower than I thought it would be, which honestly caught me off guard. I was expecting chaos I guess. Mostly it was just... waiting. And logging. A lot of logging. We ran a simplex link back to the EOC because the main repeater was acting flaky and we passed maybe a dozen formal messages over the whole shift, nothing super critical.

The part nobody tells you about is how much of this job is just being a calm presence and knowing where your gear is. The shelter coordinator had no idea what we were doing there at first and I had to explain amateur radio emergency communications from basically scratch. Felt a little weird but she warmed up to us pretty fast once she saw we actually knew what we were doing.

Anyone else had that experience where the actual activation is kind of anticlimactic compared to training? Curious if thats just how it usually goes or if ive just been lucky so far.

yeah that's pretty much how it goes most of the time honestly. the activations where you're slammed with traffic are rarer than people think, and when they do happen you're real glad the boring ones trained you to stay focused. i've been doing ARES stuff for about twelve years now and the worst activations in terms of workload were flood events, those kept us genuinely busy. but a lot of the severe weather stuff is exactly what you described — long stretches of waiting punctuated by a handful of messages.

the shelter coordinator thing is super common too. a lot of the agency folks have turned over since the last time ARES was called in so you get people who have no idea there's even a memorandum of understanding in place. our EC has been pushing hard to do annual face-to-face meetings with the served agencies just so everyone knows who we are before we show up at 2am in a vest with a radio.

this is really good to hear actually, im still working toward getting my general and have been thinking about ARES but kind of intimidated by it. didn't realize there was so much downtime lol. sounds like the logging and message handling stuff is where most of the actual skill shows up? i've been trying to practice Winlink and ICS forms but it feels a little abstract when you're just doing it at home with nobody else on the other end