It’s in the air this weekend.
The Barrie Amateur Radio Club switched on its field day at 2 p.m. Saturday and won’t switch off until 2 p.m. Sunday.
Ed Murray, the club’s public information officer, says this happens every year, on the last full weekend of June.
“Ham radio operators around North America, and some around the world, get together,” said Murray at Chappell Farms near Crown Hill, just outside Barrie. “It’s our chance to do a show-and-tell to the public how we use our equipment.
“It also gives us the opportunity to set up in an environment that’s not, like today, not very friendly.”
Saturday’s persistent rain kept the club members in tents, but it didn’t dampen their spirits.
“This is also an opportunity for us to get together as a group,” Murray said of the club, with membership numbering in the 60s. “It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great hobby.”
And the opportunities are endless with what’s called, officially, American Radio Relay League/Radio Amateurs of Canada Field Day.
“I’ve communicated with someone sitting in a park in Germany, with a portable radio on a picnic bench and that was because the conditions were just right,” Murray said. “You can talk about the weather, talk about the kind of equipment you have. Ham operators tend to shy away, most of us do anyways, from political conversations or critical information, anything like that.
“It’s just the fact you’ve actually reached out and talked to someone, somewhere out there, and it doesn’t matter where.”
Field day also allows the Barrie club members to practice rapid response, the rapid deployment of their antenna systems, which is part of the club’s mandate to help the community during an emergency.
“The city can activate us to help them move messages around,” Murray said. “Let’s say a tornado touched down and the infrastructure got wiped. The city would activate us or call us, we’re volunteers, we’d have our gear and we can provide voice communication or data communication.
“In other words sending emails through the air to help them move information back and forth without cluttering up their emergency frequencies.”
And the club tries to show young people just how much fun radio can be. Every year area Scouts have something called Jamboree in the Air in October. Last year club members went to Camp Wildman, in Tiny Township, and set up three radio stations throughout the campground for the Scouts to use.
Murray said Saturday that how the field day will go the rest of this weekend is up to the conditions.
“It’s depending on the weather and how the atmosphere behaves, because propagation is how your signals get out there,” he said. “They bounce, up, around, back and forth and it depends how far you (the signal) go,” he said.
This weekend ham radio operators will be listening for that signal, and responding.
