Members of the Ozark Mountain Amateur Radio Club are participating this coming weekend in the amateur radio ‘Field Day’ exercise from Pizza Express in Houston.
The event is open to the public. Setup is 10:30 a.m. Saturday with an official start time of 1 p.m. The exercise concludes at 1 p.m. Sunday
For more than 100 years, amateur radio – sometimes called “ham radio” – has allowed people from all walks of life to experiment with electronics and communications techniques, as well as provide a free public service to their communities during times of disaster. Field Day demonstrates ham radio’s ability to work reliably under any conditions from almost any location and create an independent communications network. More than 45,000 people from thousands of locations participated in Field Day in 2014.
“It’s easy for anyone to pick up a computer or smartphone, connect to the Internet and communicate, with no knowledge of how the devices function or connect to each other,” Sean Kutzko of the American Radio Relay League, the national association for amateur radio, said in a statement announcing the event. “But if there’s an interruption of service or you’re out of range of a cell tower, you have no way to communicate. Ham radio functions completely independent of the Internet or cell phone infrastructure, can interface with tablets or smartphones, and can be set up almost anywhere in minutes. That’s the beauty of amateur radio during a communications outage.
“Hams can literally throw a wire in a tree for an antenna, connect it to a battery-powered transmitter and communicate halfway around the world,” Kutzko added. “Hams do this by using a layer of Earth’s atmosphere as a sort of mirror for radio waves. In today’s electronic do-it-yourself environment, ham radio remains one of the best ways for people to learn about electronics, physics, meteorology, and numerous other scientific disciplines, and is a huge asset to any community during disasters if the standard communication infrastructure goes down.”
Anyone may become a licensed amateur radio operator. There are more than 725,000 licensed hams in the United States, as young as 5 and as old as 100.
For more information, contact Willy Adey, president of the Ozark Mountain Amateur Radio Club, at 417-260-4626.