Radio Field Day Is Reunion of Friends, Rehearsal for Disasters:

The weekend's Amateur Radio Field Day, hosted locally at Fort Borst Park, was for some a reunion of family members and friends and a way to connect with fellow ham radio operators. But the Field Day also has a more important purpose, said Bob Willey, emergency coordinator for the Centralia Amateur Radio Emergency Services, or ARES. The annual nationwide get-together also helps amateur radio operators hold themselves to a high standard and prepare themselves for an emergency that knocks out other forms of communications. "Our motto is, 'When all else fails, ham radio works,'" Willey said. Amateur Radio Field Day is a 24-hour event that this year ran from 11 a.m. Saturday to 11 a.m. Sunday. Participants across the nation and Canada, all licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to operate their high-powered radios, work to contact as many other ham radio operators as possible. "We get together to make sure our radios work in the field," Willey said. In the event of the major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake predicted to hit the northwest, a major flood or volcanic eruption, cell towers and other forms of communications could fail, he said. "This is the kind of communication that would be functioning after that," he said.

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