Keeping Ham Radio Relevant

Steve Irving, a 19-year-old ham radio operator in central Louisiana, was in charge of the Central Gulf Coast Hurricane Net the night Hurricane Camille made landfall on Aug. 17, 1969.

The Category 5 hurricane came ashore near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, a half hour before midnight with winds approaching 200 miles an hour. Camille's winds and storm surges of 15 to 32 feet  flattened structures along the Mississippi coast, killing 143 on the Gulf Coast and 113 in floods in Virginia.

Irving's mother was a Red Cross volunteer who nursed soldiers in France following D-Day. His father was an electrical contractor who wired ships and fighter planes in World War II. Today, Irving is a ham Red Cross volunteer with more than 50 hurricanes, tornadoes and floods to his credit.

"I manage communications and IT for Red Cross," said Irving, in his 70s and a lawyer when he's not working disaster relief. "I work with HAMs, satellites, computers, smart phones. I also work with the Amateur Radio Emergency System (ARES) to provide communication with shelters."

The more than 700,000 licensed radio amateurs in the United States are an aging bunch, average age 68, but there are enough younger people interested in the pursuit to keep alive the tradition of public service among amateur radio operators.

Amateur radio has its roots in Samuel Morse's landline telegraphy before 1850 and the wireless experiments of Guglielmo Marconi and others in the late 1800s.

The word "Ham" may have been a play on "amateur" or a put down by professional radio ops.

The electromagnetic blasts of early spark coil transmitters made hams a nuisance to others and themselves. Those early signals didn't travel very far, either, until a Connecticut ham named Hiram Percy Maxim hit on the idea of increasing the distance signals might travel by relaying them cross country. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) was founded in 1914.

One afternoon 110 years later, an affable engineer named John McAuliffe answered the telephone when I called the ARRL lab in Newington, Connecticut.

For much of amateur radio's history, ham signal interference with neighbors' radios, televisions and telephones has been a concern, McAuliffe said. With better designed radios and televisions and most televisions no longer requiring antennas, signal interference has been greatly reduced, the engineer said.

What does concern the ARRL and its Washington lobbyists are the objections of home owner associations to the appearance of antennas above subdivisions' roof lines and the encroachment by commercial interests on longtime amateur radio bands.

The Baton Rouge Amateur Radio Club, formed in 1937, and the ARRL point to the public service performed by hams in defense of antennas and protecting frequencies allotted radio amateurs.

It's hard to argue with the volunteer emergency work performed by some hams. They are unpaid. They provide and maintain their own radios and field antennas. When the skies are blue, hams train their own operators to work with the Red Cross and government disaster relief agencies.

Hams with handheld radios are embedded with emergency crews and shelters because government agencies don't always share the same frequencies. Hams are able to talk to one another wherever they are.

Ham Rick Broussard was in Pearland, Texas, south of Houston, Feb. 1, 2003, when he heard Space Shuttle Columbia had blown up on re-entry over Texas and Louisiana. Broussard had a mobile ham radio in his pickup and what he calls a "go box" he uses to work bicycle races and organized rides.

"I grabbed my go box and headed for Nacogdoches (Texas)," Broussard said.

In Nacogdoches, Broussard unpacked the go box's 2-meter radio, power supply and field antenna. Talking to hams who were converging on the East Texas town from around Texas and Louisiana, Broussard and his fellow radio amateurs set up communications at the municipal airport.

Hams rode with citizen and government responders or used their own cars and trucks to survey the shuttle's vast debris field.

"We used GPS," Broussard said. "We just went around town responding to calls from people who'd found things they thought belonged to the shuttle. One guy had several pieces of tile from the heat shield. The tiles stood out in his pasture because they just didn't look like they belonged there."

Examination of debris would later suggest that failure of wing tiles allowed hot gases to get by the orbiter's thermal protection which led to Columbia's coming apart on re-entry.

The two days Broussard helped provide communications among debris mapping crews saw as many as 50 hams at morning briefings. The hams received "little mileage checks from NASA" which they donated to the Nacogdoches amateur radio club, Broussard said.

From QRP rigs (radios operating on very low power), to more powerful radios that use a variety of amateur bands, to computer-assisted gear, hams have many ways of making themselves heard.

Amy Northrop got interested in ham radio at a field day. Field days are meant to introduce people to amateur radio and test the skills of operators in voice, Morse Code and digital modes in situations that simulate temporary, emergency stations.

For Northrop, 34, a digital art major, amateur radio fit nicely with her interest in the passenger ship Titanic. Early shortwave radio figured significantly in the rescue of survivors of the ship's sinking off the coast of Newfoundland April 14 -15, 1912.

As ships tried to reply to Titanic's distress signals, another communications challenge presented itself, Northrop said. Not all ships' radio operators spoke the same language. Eventually, Q-signals would provide a common radio language. The signals are three letter groups starting with "Q" that stand for frequently used words and phrases. For example, QRZ means "who is calling me?" or "you are being called by."

Hams maintain a station aboard the World War II destroyer USS Kidd, a museum ship moored on the Mississippi River in downtown Baton Rouge.

Ham John Krupsky, 75, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer, helps train amateur operators in the ship's ham shack situated a deck above the Kidd's wartime radio room.

"On patriotic days – July 4, Memorial Day, Veterans' Day – we get a whole bunch of hams (around the country) trying to contact the ship," Krupsky said.

QSL cards confirming contact with a museum ship are prized among amateur radio ops. QSL in HAM-speak means "can you acknowledge receipt" or "I am acknowledging receipt" of a message. The cards are mailed to hams who make contact with the Kidd.

Northrop and her husband Justin, 35, got their licenses this year. Their first radio station was at Northrop's grandparents' house using a borrowed antenna. The Northrops are among the younger members of the Baton Rouge Amateur Radio Club.

Older club members like Jon Reise, 76, and Thornton Cofield, 79, help keep ham radio relevant. Reise, a retired electrical engineer, arranges licensing exams and with other hams teaches classes in electronics for test takers. Cofield, who worked in IT for the state of Louisiana, is the club's liaison with the press.

Baton Rouge ham Russ London, a lawyer in his 70s, has worked hurricanes with the Amateur Radio Emergency Service over decades of storms in the Gulf of Mexico and accompanying floods and tornadoes.

"I'm always amazed," London said, "at how well this group that doesn't work together on a daily basis comes together in an emergency."

Ed Cullen lives in Baton Rouge. His commentaries for NPR’s “All Things Considered” are collected in the book “Letter in a Woodpile.” Read More