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A Few Clouds Preparing for communication outages across North America
The Nassau Amateur Radio Club set up a station in Baldwin Park last week, teaming up with thousands of people across North America in a drill designed to prepare for widespread communication loss.
Last Saturday and Sunday, about 40 people gathered in the park to learn about the ham radio, how to obtain a ham radio license and how to talk to others around the continent taking part in the event.
The exercise, dubbed Field Day Emergency Preparedness Drill, is an annual event that started in 1933. Participants quickly put together self-sufficient, working communication stations and make contacts with other ham radio operators in the U.S., the Caribbean and Canada.
The American Radio Relay League started the yearly drill as a tool to establish emergency communication nets during floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters. The ARRL estimates that tens of thousands of people participate in the field day each year.
“This drill happens every last full weekend in June,” Mike Komza, a Rockville Centre resident and member of the Nassau Amateur Radio Club, said. “What we do is, we set up in a remote place away from power lines, put up our own antennas, and the tents that we set up are connected to a portable generator. From there we make contacts, simulating a wide-area emergency.”
Some of the disasters that Komza and the club prepare for include a nuclear explosion that would cut off communication, as well as the eruption of a supervolcano, such as the one in Yellowstone National Park. In these instances, Komza explained, communication would be cut off for hundreds or thousands of miles. Ham radios, on the other hand, have “historically been proven to get through when other communications fail,” Komza said.
“When we do these drills, I think of that big earthquake that happened in Haiti,” Komza added, referring to the catastrophic earthquake in January 2010 in which over 100,000 Haitians died. “A bunch of ham operators took it upon themselves to go to Haiti and set up communications with people back in Miami. And all of a sudden, within about three or four hours, communication were set up between Haiti and the U.S.”
Komza made it clear that when the Red Cross gets involved in post-natural disasters like the one in Haiti, he and the club would not attempt to “take over” its operations, but rather assist the group.
Along with establishing communication in areas hit hard by disasters, the Nassau Amateur Radio Club works with hospitals and helps keep track of casualties. The club is a member of the ARRL, which, according to Komza, makes it a “special service club.”
“We specialize in emergency communication, education, technical communication and electronics,” he said.
At the annual field day, Komza and fellow licensed radio operators made contact with others across the continent who were taking part in the drill. Komza said that about 43,000 people were set up in North America for event.
“I hope that we learned that we can better ourselves and make the communication that we have a lot more efficient,” he said.
Komza added that these drills could always be improved on with such actions as making antennas more efficient. New modes of communication have been added recently, including Morse code and a digital mode whereby a computer communicates with another computer.
After decades of taking part in these drills in Baldwin, Komza highly recommended that residents apply for ham radio licenses.
“If anybody has any aspirations or interest in radio at all, one of the best things they can do for themselves is get involved in ham radio,” he said. “Right now there are three license classes in the United States. There’s the Entry license, which is actually called technician, and that gives you some privileges. Then the next one up is called General, and that gives you more privileges. Then the top one is called Extra, which gives you all the ham radio privileges on every frequency, every band, every mode.”
Komza added that ham radio operators must pass a test to receive a license. A couple days after passing the test, they receive the license from the Federal Communications Commission.
