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It’s almost impossible to be incommunicado these days.

Besides phones, fax machines, text messages and e-mail, there’s YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and no doubt other methods of communication that I’m not acquainted with yet.

So I wondered, as I was following a car with an amateur radio license tag recently, how ham radio fits into today’s world.

It turns out that amateur ham radio operators provide a valuable service to our community. Even in these days of total connectedness, when an emergency happens, often the power goes off and phone lines or cell towers go down. Then ham radio operators come to the rescue.

Trey Belton, president of the Rockingham County Amateur Radio Club, became a ham operator 14 years ago primarily because of his work as a volunteer firefighter in Stoneville.

The radio helps him monitor emergency calls.

During Hurricane Katrina, he said, amateur radio was the only method of communication. The Bush administration’s formal report on the catastrophe praised amateur radio:  

“Amateur Radio Operators from both the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the American Radio Relay League monitored distress calls and rerouted emergency requests for assistance throughout the U.S. until messages were received by emergency response personnel. A distress call made from a cell phone on a rooftop in New Orleans to Baton Rouge was relayed, via ham radio, from Louisiana to Oregon then Utah, and finally back to emergency personnel in Louisiana, who rescued the 15 stranded victims.”

Hopefully, Rockingham County will never have a need for anything remotely like that. But the Amateur Radio Club takes part yearly in a national emergency preparedness drill during which they set up generators, hang antennas in trees, and practice making contact with other clubs.  

There are about 250 ham radio operators in Rockingham County.  

As part of their community service, many watch storm conditions on a regular basis and give information to the National Weather Service.

Belton  said that during the late 1920s, the precursor to the FCC organized radio frequencies and began licensing radio operators.  In the beginning, the operators had to know Morse code, but that requirement has been eliminated.

The Rockingham County Amateur Radio Club gives exams every other month at the Eden Library.

When an operator passes the exam, the FCC assigns a call sign. Belton’s is W4SH.  

Having grown up during the CB radio craze of the 1970s with all the slang and “breaker one nine” talk, I asked him what the correct language is now. An example he gave is: “Call WA3RFE, this is W4SH calling.”    

I’ve always heard about ham radio operators talking to people all over the world. Belton says that’s called “rag chewing.”

“It’s a big deal to contact people in areas where there are few operators, like areas of Africa,” he said.

There are contests for that and operators can win awards. Oddly, while sun spots may play havoc with your television signals, they actually benefit ham radio users. They help reflect the waves back to Earth and make it easier to contact areas that are far away.

Belton has had conversations with people in Lithuania and Germany.

Most radio operators can speak English, he said. “We exchange locations and call signs, talk about the weather where we are, the areas we live in, our hobbies, our families.”

Now a digital mode on radios allows operators to type onto a keyboard rather than speak with one another.    

“Ham radio is like the original chatting or texting,” Belton said.  

Joni Carter lives in the Bethany community. Contact her at writetojonicarter@gmail.com