July 2, 2009
Emergency radio operators worked 24 hours straight in a competition across the nation last weekend.
Photo By Isaac Babcock — The Observer
By Isaac Babcock
Observer Staff
It's 8:32 p.m. Saturday and the sun's about to disappear beyond the black cloak of tree line on the west end of Winter Springs' Central Winds Park. Nine hundred and seven miles away, 60 pounds of metal are rocketing across the dome of the Earth, northeast-bound in a hurry, just as J.D. Smith awaits a date with destiny.
"Any minute now, it'll start talking," Smith says.
Crouched on a park bench under an awning, Smith sits in a gray cap tracking a ghost on the horizon. Seconds later, that speeding hunk of metal wakes with a kiss from the setting sun and its haunting signal says hello once more, just as a stifled grin broadens Smith's face.
Reaching for signals in the sky, Americans by the tens of thousands took to the radio airwaves in synchronous Saturday through Sunday. For 24 hours they shook hands through the air, said hello, and a quick goodbye, all in seconds at a time as they raced to connect with as many other radio operators as their dialing fingers could get their hands on.
This was all just a test, but the worst kind. For guys like Bob Mahon, cooped up and transmitting for hours inside a trailer the size of a large refrigerator, the hypothetical is dead serious. A disaster has just wiped out the electrical grid. The cell phone towers are useless. That's when the hams take to the air and save the day, setting up disaster communications across the area. But on the last weekend of June every year, they go global, challenging amateur radio clubs worldwide to see who's the great communicator on the airwaves.
Smith was looking a bit farther, as his fingers clicked on his laptop keyboard and spun a radio dial, and a robotic satellite antenna in a golf-cart-sized-trailer spun its metal booms searching for a signal. He's only going to get one chance to say hello to a once-dead satellite and maybe find somebody on the other side of the globe, and that window is only 12 minutes long. Mind set in tunnel focus, his restless eyes kept watching the skies.
ELO's "Calling America" could very well be the theme song playing up the montage here. Smith's voice is out in space trying to talk to someone. On the other end he hears "five-o calling," and he's in business, using an ancient solar-powered satellite as his personal telephone.
Twenty-eight years ago, Oscar Seven was a dead hunk of aluminum. But in 2002, it became something of folklore to some unusual men and women who pilot the airwaves across the atmosphere. After being dead for 21 years, Oscar Seven squawked back to life, as a once-dead battery finally broke its connection, and its spreading solar wings were fired up by the sun.
And at 8:36 p.m., after frantic spinning of a dial by satellite tracker Dave Jordan's hand, the Lake Monroe Amateur Radio Society was on the air with a radio that predated disco.
Score 100 points for the LMARS team. They were competing for points across the country, with Canadians, and with countless others on other parts of the globe, but what's competition without rivalry? They wanted to beat everybody in the points chase, including the Orlando Amateur Radio Club across the county line.
Perhaps looking for a topographical advantage, the OARC group had changed locations, no longer stringing 300-foot antennas across empty cow pasture. They'd taken the dusty road out of Chuluota and headed west for the Central Florida Fairgrounds' wide-open fields.
Sensing a challenge, the LMARS team just added more firepower, hoisting a 50-foot crane antenna over the treetops and unfurling computer-guided satellite trackers to boost their chances of racking up contacts.
Somewhere around dinnertime a dozen or so Boy Scouts showed up and sent the park's average age plummeting southward. For lifelong radio operator Rick Harrelson, that's a good sign. Most of his fellow hams have long since outlived a hint of gray. Though young by the group average, Harrelson sports a shock of white hair.
"We're still trying to get kids out here, because we just keep getting older," he said. "The younger people are just into computers. Thankfully we have that."
None of the kids stick around for the swarms of mosquitoes in the night. By Sunday morning, everybody's still alive, but the clicks on the Morse code are coming slower, and a few voices have gone hoarse.
Two hours before powering down, Jordan got lucky. Somewhere 200 miles above, astronaut Bob Thirsk said hello from the International Space Station, and Jordan was on the other end of the line. Score another 100 points.
"It's a long wait for something like that," Jordan said. "But even with just 30 seconds of talking, it feels great."
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