Preparing for communication outages across continent

By BEN FIEBERT bfiebert@liherald.com

The Nassau Amateur Radio Club set up a station in Baldwin Park last week, teaming up with thousands of people across North America in a drill designed to prepare for widespread communication loss.

Last Saturday and Sunday, about 40 people gathered in the park to learn about the ham radio, how to obtain a ham radio license and how to talk to others around the continent taking part in the event.

The exercise, dubbed Field Day Emergency Preparedness Drill, is an annual event that started in 1933. Participants quickly put together self-sufficient, working communication stations and make contacts with other ham radio operators in the U.S., the Caribbean and Canada.

The American Radio Relay League started the yearly drill as a tool to establish emergency communication nets during floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters. The ARRL estimates that tens of thousands of people participate in the field day each year.

“This drill happens every last full weekend in June,” Mike Komza, a Rockville Centre resident and member of the Nassau Amateur Radio Club, said.

“What we do is, we set up in a remote place away from power lines, put up our own antennas, and the tents that we set up are connected to a portable generator. From there we make contacts, simulating a wide-area emergency.”

Some of the disasters that Komza and the club prepare for include a nuclear explosion that would cut off communication, as well as the eruption of a supervolcano, such as the one in Yellowstone National Park. In these instances, Komza explained, communication would be cut off for hundreds or thousands of miles. Ham radios, on the other hand, have “historically been proven to get through when other communications fail,” Komza said.

“When we do these drills, I think of that big earthquake that happened in Haiti,” Komza added, referring to the catastrophic earthquake in January 2010 in which over 100,000 Haitians died. “A bunch of ham operators took it upon them - selves to go to Haiti and set up communications with people back in Miami. And all of a sudden, within about three or four hours, communication were set up between Haiti and the U.S.” Komza made it clear that when the Red Cross gets involved in post-natural disasters like the one in Haiti, he and

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