Amateur radio broadcasters test their skills in Carmel

Amateur radio broadcasters test their skills in Carmel
By REBECCA BAKERTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: June 24, 2007)
CARMEL - Alan Lounsbury doesn't think he'll win bragging rights today as the best ham radio operator in the world.
But the 44-year-old amateur broadcaster from Lake Carmel plans to have fun trying.
"There's three stations in Antarctica we'll try to reach," he said yesterday. "You try to make as many contacts as possible."
Lounsbury is among roughly two dozen ham radio operators from Putnam County who are taking part in what some consider the World Series of amateur radio - the national Field Day event.
The annual contest involves tens of thousands of ham radio operators nationwide, who give public demonstrations of their communications skill and emergency preparedness.
The Putnam Emergency and Amateur Repeater League, or PEARL, spent hours yesterday setting up generators, antenna and broadcasting equipment at Carmel's Veterans Memorial Park.
The 24-hour contest, which is open to the public, began at 2 p.m. yesterday and will wrap up this afternoon.
Lounsbury, PEARL's president and one of the youngest ham radio afficionados of the group, said he learned about ham radio from his father, who took up the hobby as a way to relax. A band director in Armonk schools, Lounsbury (KC8NPW) said he is looking forward to spending more time on the air now that school is out.
Ham radio has taken 69-year-old Jay Judell of Carmel all over the world. Judell, a sound engineer for CBS television, has visited other ham radio enthusiasts in Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
"I like to shoot the breeze and get to know people," he said. "I've talked to Barry Goldwater and King Hussein of Jordan." Their radio handles, for anyone interested, were K7UGA and JY1, respectively.
Judell (K2DXU) discovered ham radio as a student at Samuel Gompers High School in the Bronx. One day, he found some classmates at the school's radio station talking to a man in Germany.
"I couldn't believe it," he said. "I never saw a ham station before."
Jim Burke's ham radio has allowed him to talk to people in more than 100 countries and 300 locales, including a reef in the South China Sea.
Burke, a director with Orange & Rockland Utilities Inc., outfitted his car with ham radio equipment, turning his red Subaru into a mobile broadcasting station. His on-air identifier, WT4Q, is on his license plate.
"It's a lot of fun," the 54-year-old said.
It's also serious work. PEARL supplies communication during safety drills at the Indian Point nuclear power plant and works with the Red Cross and Salvation Army during emergencies. Burke uses his ham radio setup and a weather station at his Carmel home to help the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y., with local weather.
The club also runs ham radio classes and gives exams that amateur operators must pass to get licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. There are 660,000 Amateur Radio operators in the U.S. and more than 2.5 million worldwide, the Amateur Radio Relay League said.