Search This Blog

DXER Ham Radio DX News

The latest dx news/current propagation and more. Visit mike's Amateur Radio Page at www.qsl.net/swlham

Friday, July 20, 2018

Ham Radio Club Prepares for Disaster – Government Technology

(TNS) – A scrambled voice fills the room sounding like someone trying to talk under water intermixed with variable modulated frequency sounds one might hear from a music keyboard synthesizer.

A person sits behind a radio carefully moving a silver control knob with his fingers to find just the right radio frequency making the scrambled talk into a voice he can understand.

The person is a member of the Clay County Area Amateur Radio Club, which participated recently in a national Amateur Radio Relay League Field Day at the Emergency Management Operations Center in Flora.

During the early morning hours of June 23, club members set up several different sizes of antennas to use with their radios to cover a wide range of frequencies for emergency communications.

Behind the radio controls is Alan Huff, who has been a licensed Federal Communications Commission HAM operator since 1984.

He operates a HAM radio station with the call identification AI9F from his car and home. Huff is a seasoned amateur radio operator holding an Amateur Extra Class license, the highest license an amateur radio operator can achieve from the Federal Communications Commission.

Huff is retired from the State of Illinois working 38 years for the Secretary of State office in Flora and also serves as Assistant Clay County ESDA coordinator working from the Emergency Management Operations Center in Flora.

As a licensed Amateur Extra Class radio operator, Huff is able to use all HAM radio frequencies, enabling him to communicate with other HAM radio operators around the world.

“Alpha India Nine Foxtrot one Frank Illinois,” Huff says into the microphone.

“Four Alpha Kansas,” the other radio operator replied.

“We talked to Kansas pretty smooth there,” Levi Sehie, another club member with an Amateur Extra Class license, said.

“The whole idea of today is to test things out and see if they work,” Huff said.

Huff jots down the name and location of a contact he made for his radio log. Through code words the other radio operator was using, Huff knew that the HAM station he was talking to was using four radios for Field Day.

“If we had four radios in here, the noise would be unbearable,” Sehie said.

During the field day that encompassed a 24-hour period, Clay County area amateur radio operators tested their equipment and did not compete for contact points like some clubs across the county were attempting to collect.

“You could work for points,” Huff said about the Field Day event. “However, today we are working to try out the equipment, see that our installation works and that we can communicate.”

“We want to make sure we are prepared for emergency communications. Today we’re not concerned with the points,” Sehie added. “It’s hard to compete against the larger clubs who are running 10 radios.”

Clay County-area amateur radio operators brought their radios from home to be tested in the case of an emergency situation.

According to Huff, in an emergency disaster situation when the internet, cellphones and telephones are no longer usable, amateur radio operators are able to communicate when other modes of communications cannot.

Huff said the Clay County Area Amateur Radio Club is a reformation of an amateur radio club once known as Clay County Amateur Radio Club.

“We added the word area because we had people from Wayne County and Richland County interested in joining our club,” Sehie said.

“They had small clubs too and they wanted to get together with us because of our central location,” Huff added.

Huff says currently there are three levels of licensing classification for a HAM radio operator.

First level for an operator would be to pass the Technician Class license that Huff says is very restricted on the frequencies that

Read the full article at http://www.govtech.com/em/preparedness/Ham-Radio-Club-Prepares-for-Disaster.html. STRAY SIGNALS does not claim ownership of the article.

!function(d,s,id) {
var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if(!d.getElementById(id)) {
js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);
}
}
(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

from Stray Signals https://ift.tt/2L8JBK1
via IFTTT



from WordPress https://ift.tt/2JFJFez
via IFTTT

No comments:

Post a Comment