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LAS CRUCES - You probably think of ham radio - if you do at all - as a quaint hobby for people who still have a cherished collection of phonograph records and fond memories of the toy ray gun they got for Christmas.
But the county got a taste of just how important amateur radio can be twice this last month, when two telephone outages killed 911 service for hours on two separate nights. That's when the Mesilla Valley Radio Club sprang into action, deploying club members throughout the county at the request of emergency management offices to help keep police, fire, ambulance and search and rescue connected and able to communicate.
It wasn't the first time their services were required - ham radio provided an unshakable communications infrastructure during the 2006 floods in Hatch, during forest fires and earlier this month during a rescue operation in Luna County's Florida Mountains.
"There's a large number of radios available, people available and all you need is battery power," said MVRC board member Alex Burr at their East Mesa clubhouse Friday.
"Most hams are set up so, with a car battery, you don't need electrical power," said club member Terry Angle. "You can run without assistance."
Going strong since 1950, the club publishes a newsletter (the Oscillator); awards annual scholarships to New Mexico State University students; and holds an annual swap meet (called the "Bean Feed") every spring for hams throughout New Mexico, Texas and Mexico. This week, club
"If we lose all satellite tomorrow, if we get a big (electromagnetic pulse) that wipes out cell phones and land lines, ham radio will be one of the only ways to communicate," said Angle, who's also a member of the Organ Mountain Technical Rescue Squad. "You'd lose all Internet capability."
"In a national emergency, the phone exchange would probably be one of the first targets," added Fred Atkinson, the club's treasurer and a 35-year ham radio operator.
A seemingly benign act, just chatting on the radio could sometimes turn revolutionary, club members recall.
"During the first Gulf War, there was an operator in Kuwait, in a basement," Atkinson said. "He was getting a lot of good information back to our guys."
Several years ago, Robert Truitt, the club's incoming president, who got into ham radio to keep in daily contact with his father who lived in rural Texas, recalls talking with people in Argentina during a radio blackout in that country. "We provide communication when there is no communication," he said.
Most of the county's 599 ham radio operators are in it just for fun, though, after having their interest in this simple form of worldwide and local communication sparked in the pre-Internet days, when you still had to learn Morse code before earning voice privileges. Some members join roundtables that meet at set times every day, or go "county-hunting," trying to talk to operators in every county in the country. Others try to see how little power they can operate on - one local member has figured out how to operate with as little as 60 millionths of a watt.
"You could hear people from England and other countries," said Burr, who got into amateur radio half a century ago in high school. "It's very interesting ... you'd talk about the weather, their station they were using."
"You'd get on to learn about other countries," Atkinson said. "I was in South Carolina when I had my first contact, in Florida. I thought, 'Whoa. This is great!' ... You'd talk about what the other person did for a living, or they'd want to know about America."
As Burr says, "There's always somebody to talk to."
Ashley Meeks can be reached at (575) 541-5462.
Learn more
•What: Mesilla Valley Radio Club breakfast meeting.
•When: 8 a.m. Saturday, followed by a regular meeting at 9.
•Where: MVRC Clubhouse, 6609 Jefferson, at the intersection of Wilt and Jefferson in Hacienda Heights. Take U.S. 70 (North Main Street) toward Alamogordo. Get off at Porter Road exit. Head south, turn left on Cortez. Turn right on Wilt. Drive south to Jefferson.
•On the Web: www.n5bl.org
