And just like that, a bunch of people with radios, microphones and their own antennas became part of emergency-dispatch lore.
When computer crashes and power failures knocked MECCA 911 off the air in Monongalia County in 1993, the region’s amateur radio operators marshaled the channels so ambulances and police wouldn’t miss one call.
Jim Seckel, who was one of them, isn’t shy about broadcasting a historical reminder — just to let people know they aren’t alone in an emergency.
“People will tell me, ‘Well, I’ve got my cell phone or I’ve got my laptop,’ said Seckel, who often works with the Mon County Sheriff’s Department on missing person searches.
“What happens if you lose your power? What happens if the network goes down? With us, we can fire up the generator and be transmitting before you know it. And we can set up in all those places that might be hard to get to, depending on the emergency.”
If you want to get a sense of how it all works — sans said emergency of nearly 30 years ago — head up to Camp Mountaineer this weekend.
Seckel is a ham radio operator and proud of it.
Yes, they still call them “hams,” dating back not far from the beginnings of Marconi’s wondrous radio invention, when the first do-it-yourself broadcasters took the air, also.
Think today’s Twitter, or a person with a cell phone recording a breaking news event — if the Jazz Age had social media that went beyond Morse code and the scratchy warblings of Pittsburgh’s KDKA, the nation’s first radio station.
The “ham” in ham radio, meanwhile, wasn’t wordplay on the amateur designation.
It was a pejorative, radio historians say, poking fun at a DIY set not quite as adept at tapping out Morse code as the professional operators who were quickly hired and trained in the burgeoning industry.
“Ham-fisted,” many of them were, the broadcast-wags said.
First words
But back to this weekend at Camp Mountaineer: From 2 p.m. today through 2 p.m. Sunday, a host of hams will dig in and dial up at the Boy Scout camp nestled in the woods off Grafton Road near Morgantown.
It’s the annual Field Day weekend, sponsored by the American Radio Relay League, which is the overseeing governing board for the nation’s ham operators.
Seckel and fellow members of his group, the Monongalia County Wireless Association will be there, along the WVU Amateur Radio Club and the Mon County Amateur Radio Club.
That’s not necessarily exclusive, though, Seckel said. If you’re a ham operator presently not affiliated with any of the above clubs, you’re still invited, he said.
If you’re someone who is just curious about how it all works, you’re really invited, he said.
For many hams, it’s a fun hobby. They bounce radio signals off the Northern Lights as a celestial way of saying hello, and they’ve been known to tap into the International Space Station, since there’s invariably an amateur radio astronaut on board.
Most hams will tell you it’s serious fun, given the work they do after tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and other catastrophes that involve large numbers of people and little-to-no communication.
Oftentimes, the first word you’ll get after a hurricane is from a ham operator on the ground.
Hams were at the heart of the information at Ground Zero after Sept. 11. In 1993 in Mon County it took hams here just 20 minutes to begin routing MECCA’s emergency calls after that network’s system-wide failure.
At Camp Mountaineer today and tomorrow, everyone will work to quickly set up a base in the relatively remote location.
They’ll string wires and antennas while setting the generators humming to power the radio rigs.
The objective is to make radio contact with as many as possible during the run. During one Field Day a few years back, one operator talked to 42 people in the first two hours, with their call signals ranging from Quebec to California.
A ham gets Mig home
Creating sound communication networks on the fly couldn’t be more critical in these days, said Mary Irene Crowe, a ham operator and the Monongalia Wireless Association’s public information officer.
Especially, said Crowe — everyone calls her “Mig,” which is family shorthand for the two grandmothers she was named for — with climate change and civil unrest both in the air and upon the land.
Crowe became a ham because of matters of the heart. She’s a jovial Illinois native who came to West Virginia in the 1970s when her former husband followed a job here.
She fell in love with those country roads that John Denver couldn’t stop singing about, and she saw plenty of them. Once, she had a quality-assurance job that entailed lots of after-hours work at various locations across the Mountain State.
Crowe had long been an amateur radio operator, using her skills during earlier employment as an emergency medical technician and volunteer with the American Red Cross.
Getting to and from — or from and to, rather — in that quality-assurance job, though, often left her exhausted while behind the wheel.
There she would be, on Interstate 79 or a West Virginia two-lane, with two eyelids heavier than a paper plate of potato salad at your family reunion.
“I’d have the air conditioner blasting and I’d still be nodding off,” she said. She made sure her car had its own ham radio unit and whip-antenna, though.
Mig would key the microphone and give her call signal.
“Hey,” she’d say. “I’m ready to take a nap whether I want one or not and I still have 200 miles to go. Can somebody stay on and keep me talking until I pull in to my driveway?”
There was always an operator in the ham family who obliged, she said. Every time.
“That’s what we do.”
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