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WASHINGTON — For members of the Washington Area Amateur Radio Club (WAARC,) biannual contests represent both a thrill and an important exercise. On national radio field days every summer and winter, the group sets up camp and spends 24 uninterrupted hours making as many contacts as possible around the world.
Club member Lloyd Thornburg said the group served as both a hobby and a form of emergency response infrastructure. If communications between actors like hospitals, governments and emergency responders fail from any kind of disaster, the WAARC can step in and fill the gap with their own portable, off-grid equipment.
“We can get a signal in and out of the country,” Thornburg said. “When everything else fails, HAM radio works. They were the first ones to report the earthquake in Alaska in the ‘60s.”
WAARC President Mark Lukins said events like the field day served as more than a friendly competition. The race to make contact with other operators gives participants hands-on practice with the call signs, protocol and technology they’d use in an emergency.
“You work on listening skills,” he said. “There’s a lot of people on there all at the same time. You’ve got to pick out call signs, you’ve got to be able to hear the exchanges.”
Lukins said the twice-a-year timing came with seasonal challenges to ensure year-round preparedness.
“In the summertime we use stakes in the ground … we can’t do that in the winter time because the ground’s froze,” he said. “In the winter time, we kind of put our Plan B in effect … out here, on a trailer. We have other antennas that are mounted on truck hubs that are really, really heavy. You don’t need to have guys out there to hold them in place.”
For some members, emergency response is the hobby’s primary appeal. WAARC Vice President John Bush said the skills brought a sense of security, since they offer access to news and communication when cellphones and internet are off the table.
“I believe in being prepared and independent,” he said. “I’m not a ‘prepper,’ per say, like you’d see out on YouTube. But I’m originally from California, which is earthquake country. It was a very real thing, you had to be prepared to provide for yourself for a period of time … landlines went down, there was no communication for a few days.”
Operators spent the contest hours scrolling through frequencies they’re licensed on, either on the hunt for someone requesting contacts or camping on a given wavelength and asking for others to reach out, using the codes, “QRZ” or “CQ.”
At busier hours of the field day, that means dialing into a frequency, calling out, and hearing a cacophony and replies before asking one to repeat itself. Every other responder either waits on the line, or flocks to another channel where they try again.
The practice has plenty of technical challenges to boot. Weather, atmospheric conditions and competition for bandwidth threaten to disrupt a call, if not accounted for by the participants.
At 1 p.m. Saturday, those on the mic had seconds between each call. By 11 p.m., things had slowed to a quieter, slow scroll between bandwidths.
Bush said the payoff from all that work was a rush of its own.
“We’re struggling, right here, to connect to someone,” he said late Saturday night. “But then when you actually make a contact, it’s just like, ‘Success!’ There’s kind of a reward there, it’s just kind of exciting.”
Shortly before midnight Sunday morning, a conversation could be overheard between two men about a friend in Ukraine. Another operator in Italy spent much of the evening informing callers he was “not in the contest,” and instead shooting for distance, rather than quantity of communications.
With enough call outs of “Whiskey, Zero, Alpha, Romeo, Charlie,” (phonetic letters making up the WAARC’s unique call sign,) Bush reached one contest participant late Saturday night in east Texas which had already logged 800 contacts that day. Many of those happened through Morse code, rather than a microphone.
Ryan Jones, a member of that club, said he enjoyed the community that came with the hobby.
“For us, it’s about getting together outside and the fellowship and the challenge of setting up your radio equipment,” he said in a brief interview, over the airwaves. “I think your group you’re with there probably has the same sentiments that I do.”
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