Beyond Hobby: How Amateur Operators Are Turning Ham Radio Socially Useful – Outlook India (blog)

His home-made radio suddenly started to crackle and Ambarish Nag Biswas could hear muffled voices on his transceiver. It was past midnight and Ambarish, a key functionary a group of amateur radio operators headquartered near Kolkata, was just thinking of retiring to bed. The location is Sodepur, a small town 20 kilometres off the West Bengal capital, where Ambarish is secretary of the West Bengal Radio Club (Amateur). It’s nothing new, and this was the start of another interesting episode early this year.

A few days prior to it, Ambarish and quite a few members of his team had headed to a remote island at the confluence of the river Ganga and the Bay of Bengal. There, a couple had desperately sought his help in tracking their missing six-year-old daughter. “Among our club’s major activities is locating lost persons,” Ambarish says. The technical expertise of the club’s radio operators is in high demand from detective agencies trying to crack cases. In the above case, WBRC received an urgent message from detectives after they were approached by the girl’s family. Once the club members reached the site, they immediately set up a ‘radio zone’ within a stipulated radius. That was done by sending out team members in different corners with their radio transmitters as well as transceivers—a device that can both transmit and receive communications, and shares a common circuitry.

“Our key function is to establish radio networks in order to communicate between ourselves (if there is a lead) as well as to intercept conversations,” explains Ambarish. “In a large number of cases, the missing person is a victim of kidnapping, trafficking or other crime. There is almost always communication between the members of the criminal gang who don’t use traditional methods of communication such as cell-phones which are not difficult for the police to tap into. Our radio network, operating at several frequencies, is like a web picking up the minutest sounds travelling through the spectrum.”

Among the conversations intercepted, WBRC’s trackers heard a woman’s voice setting up a meeting point to “deliver” the girl. They located the source of the signal and informed the police. “The girl was being abducted,” says Ambarish. “But she could be rescued using radio signals to tap into her captors’ conversations.” The modus operandi for tracking varies per case and is customised according requirement; often it simply needs scrutiny of circumstantial evidence and other clues relied upon by detectives worldwide. On the other hand, amateur radio operators have the added advantage of being able to “listen in” to the conversations that are floating about in the atmosphere.

In fact that is the reason, according to Ambarish, he first decided to turn his expertise into a useful service. Amateur radio, referred to worldwide as “HAM” radio, was long considered just a hobby, practised by people who had obtained radio operation licenses from their respective governments. That was the case until recently, when administrators as well as military, paramilitary, police, detectives, investigative agencies and anti-terror groups started tapping into their pool of talent, special skills and expertise. In India alone, there are close to 17,000 amateur radio license holders, though only around 7,000 are active practitioners.

The Indian government’s ministry of telecommunication conducts examinations, open to all natives aged 12 years and above. Those who pass are eligible to become amateur radio operators, who would be granted licence. A “unique call sign” number is assigned to them for transmitting and accessing radio signals in specified frequency ranges—a domain that was once only of specialised groups including the army, air force, navy, secret services and of course the police.

In West Bengal, there are

Read the full article at https://www.outlookindia.com/blog/story/beyond-hobby-how-amateur-operators-are-turning-ham-radio-socially-useful/3923. STRAY SIGNALS does not claim ownership of the article.

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