When visiting a large county park the other day, I noticed a sign for “Amateur Radio Field Day, Public Welcome.” I have always had great respect for amateur radio operators, for their technical prowess and for their service in emergencies when other forms of communication go down. So, I wandered over to see what was happening.

There were maybe half a dozen large screened in gazebo type tents. In each gazebo there were one or two men seated before some radio apparatus on a table, with a couple other guys sitting in more of a spectator role, chatting away. Someone had used a potato cannon to shoot a fishing line over the top of a tall tree, which was then used to pull up a rope, which was then used to pull up a long antenna wire. There was also a tall standalone antenna mast, held erect by three guy wires staked to the ground.

What were these guys doing? There were mainly doing what hams mainly do, which is reaching out across the continent and across the globe, to make contact via radio with other amateur radio operators. Some were doing it by voice communication, using single side band (SSB) technology for more efficient transmissions. Some were using a computer interface to turn their transmissions into a digital format, which could be transmitted and received more effectively. The guy on the other end would have matching software to turn the numbers back into words.

And there was one guy doing it the old-fashioned way, listening to “beep, beep, beedily beep” Morse code coming in, and transcribing that to letters and numbers. The Morse code beeps can cut through radio clutter more strongly than voice signals, allowing more distant contacts with relatively low power. Which is kind of a bragging point.

The special thing about so-called short waves used by hams is that they can reflect or refract from the underside of charged layers high up in the atmosphere. Your signal can bounce off those layers and come back to earth hundreds or thousands of miles away. Before the Internet, this was actually a big deal. The only other ways to communicate back then with distant people were snail mail, telegraph, or long-distance telephone, which was super expensive and grid dependent. I put together a short-wave video kit around 1970, and it was pretty amazing to hear a station broadcasting from Ecuador, not to mention Radio Moscow. Voice of America and BBC short wave broadcasts helped to keep the ideal of freedom alive in Soviet occupied Europe for many decades.

The guys in the park (I didn’t see any women operators, although I know they exist) were enthusiastic and friendly. When I mentioned I have a grandson who seems interested in technology, a man pressed on me an envelope filled with electronic components, and a small circuit board, encouraging me to help my grandson solder the parts into the board to make a short-wave receiver for Morse code. I thanked him sincerely, but said I might wait till my grandson was seven or eight before embarking on this project.

I am something of a techie myself, with a professional career in chemical engineering. But I found myself far out-geeked by these gentlemen. They would be certainly eager to help in the amount of emergency, but that’s actually a very rare event. It seems much of the thrill is simply the technology itself. To truly understand antenna theory, and even to design and build your own radio, are marks of distinguishment in that crowd. What I found most interesting from a psychological point of view was that when they do connect with someone 1000 or 10,000 miles away, they usually do not stop to chitchat about things like, how’s the weather where you are, how long have you been doing this, etc. No, nothing of normal human interest, it’s just: dutifully log the other party’s location and call sign, and move on to make the next contact.

My takeaway: as I’ve done maybe once a decade, I peered into my soul to assess whether I wanted to invest the time and money into pursuing this hobby. I could crank up my aging brain to pass the technical exams required to get an amateur radio operator’s license. But to set up a working short-wave radio and antenna, and get proficient at using it, would take a lot of effort. And in the Internet age, reaching out and touching someone on a different continent in real time just is not the rush that it used to be. As a responsible citizen, the emergency preparedness aspect is of interest to me. However, there is a newer, alternative class of radio called GMRS, which I think may be more realistic for most emergency situations. My encounter the other day with the hams did cause me to reengage with GMRS, and I may write a blog post about that in the future.