Slices of ham

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For most people, this seemingly random list of dots and dashes is meaningless. But for Jordan Mash, this language makes perfect sense.

It’s Morse code for: K4YHB. His amateur radio club’s call sign.

In the time it takes to say “Kilo four,” Mash taps out the identifier again.

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He leans in to listen to a black speaker on top of his amplifier. The code sounds like electronic birds chirping in the rafters.

“There’s thunder out there,” he says, looking at the southern horizon turning black with clouds. “There are static crashes. Each time lighting strikes the signal drops.”

He sits under a screened-in chickee hut in the backyard of a home in southwest Naples, west of Collier Boulevard. He turns an Oreo-sized dial on his tuner, hoping for a stronger signal.

Again: —.— ....— —.— — .... —...

He strains to hear the chirps over the thunder and clatter of the other ham radio operators from the Amateur Radio Association of Southwest Florida.

There are about 15 hams here, tapping and chattering away. A man next to him calls into a microphone, “Kilo four yankee hotel bravo. Copy. Kilo four yankee hotel bravo.”

The place sounds and looks like a command post. The buzz of static, beeps and call signs constantly filling the air as the men hunker over their radios.

Occasionally they will leave their post. Fumble with wires. Re-direct an antenna. Take a small break and talk to another operator (mostly about radios). But mostly it’s: “Kilo four yankee hotel bravo. Copy. Kilo four yankee hotel bravo.”

You half expect a general to be standing over these guys, monitoring their progress. But this not a war game. This is Field Day, a 24-hour national competition held annually to prepare ham operators for emergency situations in which power outages and downed telephone systems render other forms of communication impossible.

The object of the competition is a radio bingo of sorts. Clubs will work through the night in an attempt to contact as many of the other participating clubs as they can. The numbers won’t be counted and published for another eight months, but the Naples club made about 1,400 contacts in the 24-hour period.

The real prize: bragging rights and the gratification of working the airwaves.

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Hams run their equipment with car batteries, generators and solar panels — anything that can power a radio if the electricity goes out, which proves especially useful during hurricane season.

The methods of communication: Morse code, traditional voice, and TV signals.

They work on frequencies just above the highest number on the AM dial up through microwave frequencies — 1.8 megahertz to 275 gigahertz, according to the ARRL’s website, www.arrl.org.

Thousands of clubs across the United States and Canada have lugged their equipment from spare bedrooms and basements into parks and fields for the event. There are more than 2,000 clubs in the U.S., according to the American Radio Relay League, which sponsors these types of events.

“Hold on. Hold on,” Mash says. His ear practically touching the speaker. “It’s California!”

“Orange County,” he says triumphantly.

“That’s a contact,” says the 55-year-old ham, typing the California station’s identifier, W6ZE, into a computer.

Just outside the hut, sitting under a wood awning, the other hams work away.

From one operator: “CQ field day. CQ field day. Copy.”

From another: “This is five alpha south Florida. That’s 5ASFL.”

The gravel driveway is filled with cars and trucks spiked with antennas. Each looks like it has two or three fencing foils jabbing the air. Trailers are loaded with wires and rods.

The event, which ran last weekend, is pure entertainment for club members, with a dash (and a dot) of practicality and training. While this is mainly a basement-based hobby for most of these middle-aged men, it is also a public service.

“When cell phone towers crash, the power goes out, and telephone lines are jammed our radios work,” Mash says.

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“This helps save lives,” says Gary Randall, a 12-year-veteran of Field Day.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, he helped coordinate rescue operations from a spare bedroom in his Fort Myers home, the 59-year-old says.

“I saw what was going on on my TV, and I jumped on my radio. I knew their communications were going to be down,” he says.

“Ham radios were the only thing working,” he says, “and I was able to pick up signals, for some reason, that a lot of other hams couldn’t.”

After Randall got a distress call over the airwaves, he would phone in the information to the Red Cross, which would then organize a rescue, he says.

“It was a relay system,” he says, “I must have helped in 12 rooftop rescues.”

Beyond individual efforts like Randall’s, the club sets up at local hurricane shelters during storms, just in case.

“We worked for a few hours during Wilma,” Randall says. Members of the club also worked during Hurricane Charley in 2004.

During the Vietnam War, then Chief Petty Officer Randall was a radioman for the submarine service. While submerged for three months at a time, he maintained constant radio contact with his command center. “I was in charge of getting the release codes to fire missiles,” he says.

The radio exchanges were confidential and the technology was specific to submarines during the war, but Randall says amateur radio works on the same principles. He explains that the basic requirements for transmitting messages are open airwaves and the right atmospheric conditions, or propagation.

Radio signals either travel directly from one antenna to another, line of sight, or they bounce off satellites, layers of atmosphere, and even the moon before an antenna picks them up.

“If you want to talk with someone on the other side of the world, the conditions have to right,” “Randall says. “Even then it’s a crap shoot. It’s completely random who you’re going to end up talking with. One minute it could be Iowa, the next Indonesia.”

These hams in turn become part meteorologists, part astronomers. They track solar activity and weather patterns to optimize their ability to transmit. Transmissions bounce off layers of the atmosphere like a mirror, and during the day the sun burns off some of the layers, making rebounds back to Earth sometimes iffy, he explains. So certain times of day are better for long-distance radio.

When Randall’s not helping rescue operations, he gets his kicks bouncing signals off objects in space, including the moon. (It takes about two seconds for his voice to travel the estimated 240,000 miles to the moon and back, Randall says).

He tracks space stations and shuttles with his computer, for a chance cosmic encounter. NASA always sends at least one ham operator on missions, in case equipment fails and to keep the astronauts busy, he explains.

In 1995, while driving through Leadville, Colo., Randall used his car ham to contact the Russian space station, Mir.

“I used that radio there,” he says, pointing to a black box mounted just underneath the car’s traditional radio.

“We just talked for a second; they have so many people trying to get in touch with them,” he says, “I did get to use a bit of the Russian I know, though.”

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At 8:20 p.m. the rain starts clapping against the wood awning.

Ernie Guimares, 66, calls into his black mic: “CQ Field Day. CQ Field Day.”

CQ means calling all stations.

“I’m trying to get through this mess,” he says, looking at the downpour.

Guimares’ frustrations are tempered, however, as sunset approaches. He knows “the gray line,” the band around the Earth that separates daylight from darkness, is approaching. It happens at dusk and dawn, when atmospheric layers burned off by the midday sun start to re-develop.

“You see an increase in radio activity at that time,” says Dan DeVaul, an electronics engineer and club member.

“A lot of people who listen to AM radio will notice they can start to pick up radio stations from places like Tokyo,” the 46-year-old says. “It’s an optimal environment. Operators get very excited.”

DeVaul built his first radio when he was 6.

“It was a crystal radio,” he says, “I built three before I moved on to transistor radios when I was 12.”

Around 2 a.m. the rain has stopped.

Allen Randolph, a voice operator, is one of only two club members still here. The others have decided to work in shifts, going home to get a couple hours rest.

Randolph is sluggish, but he keeps plugging the call sign: K4YHB. Eventually he gets a contact. Lithuania.

“That’s the furthest contact I’ve ever made,” he says with a smile, like someone just gave him a treasured piece of candy.

“It doesn’t count for Field Day,” he says, “I just gave him my call number, he gave me his, and I moved on.”

Other operators like Mash have been making international contacts since they were kids. Since the 1960s Mash has talked with hams all over the world, from such far-flung places as Mongolia, Israel and Mauritania.

“You just never know who you’re going to talk to,” Mash says. “The random possibilities keep you coming back.”

When he was 15, Mash met a boy in Moscow over voice radio. They kept in touch over the next few years, he says.

“For the longest time, I thought he was American,” Mash says. “Turns out he learned English on the radio. No one else in his family spoke English.”

The Cold War was raging at the time and many of Mash’s friends had negative opinions of Russians. But, through his radio conversations, Mash says he realized that children in Russia are very similar to children in the U.S.

“He was no different. We were both going through similar things, including the war,” Mash says.

While it’s not illegal for U.S. hams, there’s an unspoken agreement not to discuss issues like religion, politics or any other potentially heated subject. The favored topics of conversation: radio equipment, broadcasting strength, and the weather.

The Federal Communications Commission does prohibit hams from broadcasting music or entertainment. Singing “Happy Birthday” is out of the question. Business transactions are also against the law.

The U.S. laws are lenient, says Yoel Reinoso, an immigrant from Cuba who moved to Naples seven years ago. When Reinoso, 33, was growing up in Cuba, ham radio regulations there were more severe, he says.

“If you said anything that the government didn’t, like you could get into a lot of trouble,” he says. “My father was one of the only hams in our neighborhood, but he gave it up so he didn’t get in trouble. He didn’t want to give the government an excuse to keep us from moving to the United States.”

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Ham radios seem decidedly low-tech in an age of Internet chat rooms and instant messaging. But while technologies like net phones and cell phones may seem to be pushing ham radio operators into the background, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina remind us that even Morse code, invented in 1835, still plays a vital role in the 21st century.

The members of the Naples club are adamant when they say that while they may be getting older, and fewer people are interested in ham radio, this is not a dying form of communication.

Mash explains ham radio’s endurance in terms of love and relationships.

“It’s the reason I’m single,” Mash says. “You spend 42 years with something, all I have to say is, ‘The radio was here before you, and it will be here after you.’”