The recently reorganized, Lake Area Amateur Radio Klub (LAARK), met Feb. 12 to discuss the uses of amateur radio in The Colony.
“When all else fails” is a common motto when radio operators are answering the question of “Why do you do this?”
“I have had to point out to officials that in an emergency you can’t depend on cell phones, office phones, or even the internet,” said Bill Cunningham, President of LAARK. “When hurricane Katrina hit the gulf states there were none of the services available. Even the 911 system was out of service because it was overloaded. If you wanted to talk to anyone inside or outside of the disaster area then it had to be done with radio.”
Amateur Radio, also called ham radio, depends on radio waves and allows for long distance communications without depending on any of the local services, according to Cunningham. “The only thing we need to communicate is power, and we can get that from generators or even batteries,” Cunningham said.
The presentation for the club was being provided by Gerald Marchant of the Denton County Office of Emergency Management. Marchant spoke on the services that the County Emergency Management Office provided to city and county residents.
“What should we do as a club or resident to help The Colony in case of an emergency,” asked William Howard of The Colony. “You should contact the Denton County Emergency Management office and volunteer your services. When a city is involved in a disaster, one of the first communications made is to the county office for support. We have a list of hams in the area and start an emergency response. We assign people to provide communications for police, fire, and city offices,” Marchant said.
“Depending on how wide spread the disaster we will even put communications support in the hospitals, and red cross offices,” he said “We need the hams so we can support the entire county, we can’t build a big enough internal support group and must use the radio clubs in the communities.”
After the presentation the club members discussed other aspects of the hobby. Hot subject of discussion was “DXing”, a contest to see how many people from other states and countries you can contact, building antennas with simple things found around the house to comply with a Home Owners Association, and the use of the club’s repeater.
The repeater is a piece of equipment radio operators use to cover large areas with small radios. A user can transmit to a repeater and the signal will be repeated at a much higher power to cover a larger area. When they talk about it with someone new it sounds more like a code, “The repeater is on 147.380 with a positive offset and a pl of 110.9,” said Dave Adkisson. While it sounds complicated, that is something that is learned while getting the first license level, technician.
The club had a varied amount of experience in attendance. One 14-year-old present had been a technician for over a year, and a new radio operator had his technician license for four weeks, in contrast there was also a gentleman who has been working with radios for more than 45 years.
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