Dwight Hastings waved his hand in frustration and went back to refining reception of a radio transmission from San Francisco at Riverside Park Saturday afternoon.
He gingerly turned a dial on a ham radio owned by Iolan Ralph Romig and finally, with crackling interference eliminated, heard the other operator’s voice clearly.
Hastings was among about a dozen ham operators who participated in American Radio Relay League Field Day activities over the weekend. The annual field day dates to the mid-1950s. This was Iola Amateur Radio Club’s fifth year of participation.
The nationwide field day tests amateurs’ abilities to set up operations, just as they would in the event of an emergency such as when tornadoes struck Joplin and Greensburg.
They start from scratch.
“It took us about an hour and a half to get everything up and operating,” including four antennas that opened a broad range of communication bands, Romig said.
In a true emergency, the Iola group could be on the air even quicker with the just enough antenna capacity to begin operations, he allowed.
“The object of field day is for us to set up all our equipment and make sure that it is in good working order,” Romig explained. “Also, it lets us assess our capabilities to respond to an emergency.”
Power for the radios was drawn from batteries and two small generators, just as would be the case in a disaster that left power lines downed.
To give an idea of how capable the hams are, Romig said with the three radios used in the Iola exercise, the hams had access to all broadcast bands about those reserved for commercial use to just below microwave transmissions.
“We have a lot of elbow room,” he said.
During the exercise, local ham operators talked to others throughout North America, including Canada.
AMATEUR RADIO dates to the early 1900s.
Romig noted that the federal government recognized the importance of amateur radio operators as an advantage in time of war or for domestic emergencies.
“When we got into World War I, many hams were drafted to operate military radios because they knew Morse code,” while many in the military didn’t, he observed. “During World War II, hams were drafted again, to teach Morse code and operate radios.”
Amateur radio was put under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission by the Communications Act of 1937.
Romig has been a ham since 1964.
A year earlier he was a fledgling radio operator for the Kansas Highway Patrol and was completing studies to pass the Morse code examination when KHP switched to teletypes for the bulk of its communications. A friend in Salina, Ron Hogg, encouraged Romig to get his ham operator’s license, since he had spent the time to learn Morse code.
