“Whiskey-Zero-November-Echo-Delta-Three-Alpha-Charlie-Oscar,” was heard as the operator hunched over his radio, attempting to contact other radio operators across the United States. By dusk on Saturday, June 26, 2021, radio operator Scott Allen, call sign W0SJE, had contacted over 160 individual sites in the United State and Canada, which included almost all the states and some territories in Canada. By the end of the weekend, he would tally 428 contacts and 1405 total points. He has been a member of the Indian Peaks Radio Club, IPRC, since August of 2020 but has been a ham operator for over forty-five years.

Charley Ray, call sign K4NYN, has been club president for little over a year. He was equally as busy working on a newer device, one that used digital signals to contact other operators participating in the 2021 summer field day.

“Summer field day is really the big one,” Ray said, “in the ham radio world there’s two. There’s winter field day and summer field day. It’s very much an international thing, as a matter of fact, and in the ham radio community summer field day is like the Christmas of the ham year. So, ham clubs and ham operators all over the world will be activating for summer field day weekend.”

“It’s a twenty-four hour contesting period,” Ray continued, “where clubs to make as many contacts as they can, and contacts via as many methods as they can within that twenty-four hour period. It’s regulated and synchronized using Greenwich mean time, Zulu time, and everybody’s doing it within the same twenty-four hours.”

Club founder George Lehmkohl, call sign W0NFW, is writing his contacts by hand as he wields his radio to add the total number of contacts. He had helped co-found the club in 2015 after fifty years of ham radio operating. He spoke about the purpose of the field day.

“This was started many years ago by the Amateur Radio Relay League, known as ARRL, and the purpose was for emergency communications,” he said, “and if you had a setup in times of disaster everybody knew where their battery-powered equipment were, where antennas were, and this was setup, as you can imagine, long before cell phones or anything else. And so, what’s called HF and communications, and that set of frequencies were used. Canadian provinces are heavily involved, as well as the United States in the present day and have been for many years.”

During the fires in 2020, the power was intentionally shut off in mountain communities, and ham operators were critical communication points for emergency response and information, being faster and more accurate than the internet feeds that locals were accessing.

John Adler, KE6CFW, another founder of the club, also serves as the trustee. “The trustee is the interface to the FCC,” he said. The FCC, or Federal Communications Commission, is the governmental agency that regulates interstate and international communications through cable, radio, television, satellite, and wire.

Charley Ray points to the club banner and explains, “the club call is W0NED. Just like a ham operator has his call sign, a club also has their call sign.”

Adler said that the call sign communicated the club’s location and that once somebody knew the language they could decipher by the number in the sign, the region that the club operated from.

“So when we put in for our call sign we wanted Ned, for Nederland, and it wasn’t taken, so similar to a vanity plate we requested to have a call sign. We requested this call sign for our club and luckily it was available for us.”

Diane Stanitski, call sign KE0FHR, serves as secretary of the IPRC and gave a background on the club’s history. “Jan and Mike Mussler were the original ‘mother and father’ of the club, they started it. It really began when a ham radio operator passed away and his wife donated all of his equipment to us. So, we established a club, and a clubroom at the Nederland Community Center,” she said, “all that equipment is there, and we just started building from there.”

Stanitski explained, “There was a real need that was recognized during the 2013 flooding event, and because of that, many different people across the mountain communities really wanted to establish some ham presence so we would have emergency communications no matter what, regardless of what kinds of natural hazards occur.”

The IPRC meets on the fourth Monday of every month and is open to the public. Over the past year the club had been holding meetings through Zoom, but the next meeting will be in person at the Nederland Community Center on July 26, at 7 p.m. with an added option of attending online. The club also conducts “nets,” or amateur radio “networks” every Monday night with hams throughout the area, which enables operators to communicate with each other and discuss related topics.

The IPRC can assist local residents interested in being licensed and trained in ham operation, and can be reached at https://indianpeaksradioclub.org/index.html for further information.