Rats gather for Field Day

A local amateur radio club in Richmond, Virginia, will set up a portable radio station at Henrico park as part of an international emergency preparedness exercise this weekend.

Local amateur radio operators or “hams” will be participating in a 24-hour communications exercise with thousands of others across the United States and Canada as a part of the American Radio Relay League’s annual Field Day event.

The event, organized locally by the Richmond Amateur Telecommunications Society (RATS), will run from 2 p.m. Saturday, June 25, until 2 p.m. Sunday, June 26, at Laurel Park near the intersection of Hungary and Hungary Spring roads.

“Field Day is a decades-old tradition in the amateur radio hobby,” RATS President Jerry Williams said.
“What was organized years ago as an exercise for emergency communications following a national disaster has turned into one of the biggest contests in the hobby.”

More than 30,000 hams in the United States, Canada and other countries will set up their stations and antennas in remote places and operate them using non-commercial
power such as generators and batteries for the duration of the event. They will spend 24 hours trying to contact as many other North American amateurs as possible under these less-than-ideal conditions.

“Field Day is a way for hams to get outdoors and have fun under some difficult conditions,” Williams said. “But it’s also a chance to fine-tune our emergency communication skills. The idea is to put together a self-sufficient, working station quickly and begin making contacts. It’s also a chance to publicly demonstrate what ham radio can do.” The public is invited to observe the exercise, learn about ham radio and even make a contact or two with a station across the U.S. or on the other side of the world. There are 670,000 Amateur Radio operators in the U.S., and more than 2.5 million
around the world.

Through the ARRL, hams provide emergency communications for the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizens’ Corps, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, FEMA and many other state and local agencies. Worldwide, hams are known for establishing and maintaining emergency communications during floods, hurricanes, fires, earthquakes and other major disasters where normal methods of communication are either overloaded or out of service.

RATS was founded in 1972 by a group of local ham radio operators who had a common interest in communications and furthering the art of amateur radio. Today the society has more than 115 members and meets monthly.

For more information about RATS, visit the society’s webpage at http://www.rats.net.

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