The Morongo Basin Amateur Radio Club (MBARC) has been transmitting and receiving out of the hi-desert since 1971 and this weekend they’ll be holding a “Field Day” out of the Yucca Mesa Community Center. I spoke with MBARC Vice President Larry Mollica about amateur radio and why communication over the airwaves still matters in the age of the internet.
Larry Mollica: “Yeah, why do people fool around with amateur radio when they could just pick up their smartphone and call someone on the other side of the earth? If you saw a guy fishing on a pier, would you ask him ‘why are you doing this when you can go to that supermarket right there and buy some really nice fish?’ You wouldn’t ask him that because you already know the answer… the man likes to fish!
“It’s kind of like that, it’s for the challenge. Some people like emergency preparedness. They may be part of search and rescue or have ties to other emergency organizations locally. In some cases they’re just maybe preppers living in a compound out in the desert somewhere but they want some means of communications that is independent from the communications infrastructure, which is sometimes vulnerable.”
The club’s field day in Yucca Valley is part of a larger national event where amateur radio enthusiasts will be out transmitting into the void all weekend just to see who answers back.
Larry: “Field day isn’t formally a contest, but it really kind of is a contest. And what we do is we get on the air on shortwave and you’re trying to make as many contacts as possible, to put it simply. You’ll be calling CQ, which is the call you put out saying that you want somebody to answer you and you don’t care who. And then someone comes back to you… maybe in Los Angeles or they may be in New Hampshire. You have a little exchange of information, you record the contact on the computer and you go on to the next one. We’re not really in it for the points, we’re mostly there to have fun and play with radios.
“I like technical geekery. I like the electronics equipment and knobs and meters and things that light up. You know, there’s a attraction to people who have either engineering or technical backgrounds but a lot of the people in it aren’t engineers and they aren’t that technical. They just like playing around with the radios.”
That’s what I love about radio. I have memories of growing up in the mountains of southern Oregon and staying up late in my dad’s pickup truck, scanning the CB radio channels and talking to anybody who was listening. Shortwave radio can be about that too, but Larry says that’s the beauty of amateur radio, you can get into it for all sorts of different reasons.
Larry: “There’s 75,000 amateur radio licenses in the U.S. and an estimated three million worldwide, so you could be talking to a person across town or a person across the country.”
Amateur radio and the Morongo Basin Amateur Radio Club don’t exclusively transmit and receive on the shortwave radio band, but it’s one of the most popular and far-reaching.
Larry: “It can go worldwide. The signals you put out when conditions are right and the sunspots are being kind to you… the signals will bounce around the ionosphere and come back down maybe on the other side of the planet. On rare occasions, hams have put out a signal and heard this delay of their own signal coming back and that’s because their signal went around the world and came back the other side. It happens. It’s somewhat unpredictable. A lot of it depends on the weather on the sun. It’s part of the signs that really amateur radio played a big role in how the conditions on the sun affect the earth’s ionosphere and affect radio signals.”
If the science and engineering behind amateur radio sounds interesting, there are club members who’d be happy to talk to you during the field day event. But if you just want to see what all this transmitting and receiving is about, come on down, you can explore that curiosity as well.
Larry: “The general public’s welcome to come in and see. If somebody’s adventurous and they want to take the microphone and make one of these field day contacts, we’ll show them how to do it and sit there and walk them through it.”
Ham or shortwave transmissions require a license, but that can be pretty easily obtained online. And you definitely don’t need a license to come down and check out all the action during the club’s field day this weekend. But if you have the equipment and the license, jump onto the Morongo Basin Repeater W6BA and see if Larry’s out there listening.
Larry: “The easiest way is on the repeater system we have… it covers the valley pretty good. I’m usually listening to that thing. And my call sign is AD6G: Alpha Delta Six Golf.”
The Morongo Basin Amateur Radio Club’s field day starts at Saturday at 11:00 a.m. at the Yucca Mesa Community Center located at 3133 Balsa Avenue in Yucca Valley.
Larry and I discussed how radio has been useful in the 50 years he’s been in the hobby, and he relayed this story about a club member who got lost in a Twentynine Palms wash and was “rescued by radio.”
Resources:
The Morongo Basin Amateur Radio Club (w6ba.net)
The National Association of Amateur Radio Field Day event (arrl.org)
Getting Licensed for amateur radio (arrl.org)
