Whitley County Amateur Radio Club field day provided community education, awareness of amateur radio
(Talk of the Town photos by E. Matthew Pugh) Participating in the ARRL field day event at Peabody Public Library, Whitley County Amateur Radio Club members Lee Simmonds, left, and Ed Scott, right, work together to make contact with other radio operators around the country. Below, a temporary radio tower stands steady despite winds. In extended entry, the radio shown is one that can be used by amateur radio operators to assist local authorities durinng crisis situations when all other forms of communication have failed.
By E. Matthew Pugh
Every year in the U.S. the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) members put on a field day. Locally, the field day was held over a 24-hour period from 2 p.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday. 
Field day is put on for two reasons -- the first is to raise awareness that there are still amateur radio clubs out there and to share with the community that amateur radio clubs have been gaining members as the years progress. The second reason is to give people a feel for what exactly an amateur radio group does.
Field day is held all over the U.S. by other groups of the ARRL and is a sort of competition. Points are awarded to a group for various things such as making contact with another group, teaching someone without a license and having them make contact with another group. Additionally, teaching a child gains them even more points for teaching the youth about amateur radio. The Whitley County Amateur Radio Club were awarded extra points for holding their field day at the Peabody Public Library, because it is considered public property.
The Peabody Public Library had approached Whitley County's local radio club to see if they would put on an event to show children and other patrons the ins and outs of amateur radio. The Whitley County Radio Amateur Radio Club have been holding their meetings at the library for some time now and asked if they could make their event the day of field day and earn some extra points while teaching the youth of Whitley County about amateur radio, said local radio club member Dan Dahms.
Throughout their setup, some of the members had some scares with setting up the radio tower but eventually got it up and running just fine despite a bit of wind yesterday. Their largest tent, a headquarters of sorts, was blown over by the strong wind early on and was damaged too extensively to put back up. Rain also caused them some trouble in the beginning, but soon subsided to extreme heat.
They had three stations set up, and all of it was running on emergency power generators. They can contact people as far south as Mexico and as far north as Canada.
By late afternoon, they had contacted Canada, Texas, New Mexico and Florida. They normally get about 1 contact a minute, but can get 2-3 in a minute on a good day.
This individual club has existed since 1990, and no other amateur radio clubs are known to have existed before it in Whitley County. Most clubs have been around since the 1930s and 1940s so Whitley County's club is fairly young.
On field day, according to Dahms, amateur radio club members are only trying to have short conversations and trying to get location information to gain more points. Normally, these amateur radio clubs would talk to people over the radio about just about anything -- having interesting conversations with people they've never met. The only thing that is illegal to talk about over amateur radio is business, Dahms said. You cannot have any business-related talks over amateur radio.
It is interesting to know that amateur radio has continued to develop as technology upgrades. Amateur radio has the ability to use the internet to reach farther distances with short range radios. They have something called APRS which is a form of GPS that allows tracking, and allows them to send short text messages. Amateur radio was also sending small pictures and texts before cell phones were able to do it. 
One of the most important things to know, however, is that when a natural disaster happens, such as the flooding that took place in southern Indiana not to long ago, it knocks out all of their forms of communication, cell towers, phone lines, internet -- however radio still works, amateur radio technicians were the ones in those kind of situations to send messages to the other shelters, and called in for more help because radio has it's own system and doesn't rely on a large network to continue working.
More than 650,000 Americans have Amateur Radio licenses and there are over 2.5 million license holders through the world.
There were over 30,000 operators in last year’s field day event.
Comments
Excellent, very accurate story on Amateur Radio field day!
Lee
Posted by: LeeSimmonds | June 30, 2008 09:41 AM