Ham radio increases role in national security

Will Oremus

Monday, June 30, 2003 | 11:15 a.m.

John Bigley, president of the Nellis Amateur Radio Club, recalls a time long before cell phones or the Internet, when ham radio was all the rage for technically inclined kids like him.

"We were the original chat room," he said.

But amateur radio, which allows licensed citizens to communicate locally and globally via personal radio stations, has become more than just a frivolous hobby.

From his perch on a bench in Sunset Park, where the amateur radio operators of the Las Vegas Valley were meeting over the weekend for their annual emergency communications drill, Bigley pointed to the cell phone towers atop Black Mountain in the distance.

"Say a terrorist gets up there and takes out those towers," he said. "Just like that, all the cell phones in Las Vegas are out.

"But we've got towers on every mountain. They'd have to go up to every single one and knock out the towers, plus all 2,000 of us, in order to stop ham radio communication."

The reliability and decentralized nature of the ham radio system prompted the Department of Homeland Security's recent enlistment of the American Radio Relay League, the hobby's national association, into the national Citizen Corps.

The radio league runs the emergency drill each year. For a system that for decades has been key to communications during natural and man-made disasters, the drill is serious business.

But the hobbyists also have fun, seeing who can contact the most operators around the country and the world in a 24-hour period.

This year's event held added significance, with the Homeland Security affiliation lending new luster to a hobby that had seemed destined for the junk heap of history.

More than 100 attendees turned out between Saturday and Sunday at noon to connect with fellow amateurs from Montana to Cuba. The local participation was up from about 75 last year.

Hartman said the digital revolution "has taken its toll on the interest in this field, because everybody has a computer or a cell phone." But he maintained that amateur radio has always held value as both a learning device and a last-ditch communication system.

And now, the more than 2,000 licensed operators in Southern Nevada couldn't be more proud of their role in national security.

"It kind of gives us a purpose," said Gary Hartman, who coordinates Southern Nevada for the national amateur radio group. "We can do something that can help the community."

Though it has long been instrumental in disaster relief efforts, ham radio regained national attention in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"When the planes hit the towers, instantly New York City had zero communication," Bigley said. "Amateur radio operators were in there within 30 to 45 minutes and they put up towers, and that's the only way New York communicated for weeks."

Since then, Hartman said, "A lot more people are coming into it because they're interested in the emergency preparedness side."

Public service is an integral part of the amateur radio ethos, but the main draw for many is the chance to fiddle with gadgets.

At the monthly meetings of the Nellis club, one of four local ham radio clubs, "We come to play radio," Bigley said.

"I started out when I was 9 years old," he said. "In those days we couldn't buy a radio. I would go to the radio repair shops and sort through the junk they threw out back."

Then he would build a working ham radio out of it.

A majority of attendees at the drill on Saturday and Sunday were, like Bigley, lifelong practitioners. But there was also a younger contingent of tech-savvy operators.

With earrings and a tattoo, 34-year-old Jamie Gorr is a poster child for the current generation of experimenters who harness the Internet to create new forms of ham radio communication.

Gorr dials his ham radio into an Internet-based device called the KV7RSI Echolink Repeater to contact friends in Pennsylvania.

"KV7RSI is the guy who runs it," Gorr explains. "He's sort of the trustee."

Operators typically identify each other by their ham radio tags -- Gorr couldn't remember KV7RSI's real name.

"There's always something new," said Hartman, whose regular job is computer programming. "These are kind of the core group of experimenters in the country, still building things in their garage. When something new comes out of Bell Labs, a lot of times it's an amateur radio operator who came up with it."

Bigley pointed to a slew of kids running back and forth between the tables as a "new crop" of youths interested in amateur radio.

He said that educational projects by the local clubs are reaching children all over the area, teaching them electronics, science, geography and communication skills.

How can such dated technology be instructive to kids today?

"It starts the exploring process," Bigley said. "The inventor of radio, televisions -- it was amateurs who made it."