UCF club participates in ham radio Field Day

The UCF Amateur Radio Club spent the weekend scouring the airwaves to establish contact with other radio aficionados statewide, nationally and internationally as part of its annual Field Day.

Field Day is an event organized by the Amateur Radio Relay League, an organization that brings together amateur or ham radio operators. The event, which runs for 24-consecutive hours, helps hams establish contacts and practice emergency communication.

"Ham radio becomes really relevant during hurricanes," said Keith Wall, club president and master's student in public administration. "When the power goes down, you have only a couple of hours backup on the cell phones, and when the power goes down, police radios go down. We can keep running."

The club set up shop on Memory Mall, with three large antennas and several smaller ones, plus a tent to house all of the equipment.

"With this setup we can easily talk around the world," Wall said. "We can run two to four stations simultaneously. We do a satellite contact — we transmit to a satellite in orbit and talk to someone somewhere else on the planet. It's one of our favorite things to do because it's such a difficult thing to accomplish."

Another one of those stations is the Get on the Air station, which allows nonlicensed people to get some air time.

"With GOTA, we're giving people who are walking by a chance to get on the air and make some contacts themselves," said Scott Harden, who graduated with a master's degree in micro and molecular biology in May. "In the process of having fun they're preparing for a real emergency."

Despite its title, the club's members are anything but amateur. Each member is licensed to both set up and operate a radio station.

Harden is a technician, which means he has passed the first of three tests needed for his license. People can take a test to receive their station certificate, which authorizes them to prepare and maintain a radio station. People can also take a test to earn their operator's license, which allows them to operate a radio station.

"When you go to McDonald's they have a drive-through radio station, but they're only licensed to operate it," Wall said. "When you go to Motorola or those places, they can only build stations. The police can only operate them. That's the difference — we can do both."

The Amateur Radio Club actually predates UCF. It was first established when UCF was Florida Technological University.

"We're one of the oldest clubs on campus," Wall said.

Although the club has held the Field Day event at UCF for the past few years, it hasn't been receiving funding from the Student Government Association.

"We have gotten funding from SGA in the past but haven't tried to put a bill through in the last couple of years," faculty adviser Steve Dick said. "Several of the radios here were bought by SGA years ago. Some of the radios are owned by club members, too, so it's really a mixture."

Both Dick and Wall said that the club is running the event almost exclusively digital this year.

"We run these radios at 100 watts max, a little more than two incandescent bulbs," Wall said. "With that we can talk globally. When you think of that in terms of power consumption, it's nothing."

The club works with different types of radio, including Morse code, AM radio and FM radio in addition to digital.

"One of the great things about amateur radio is that we are flexible both in how and where we work and what we can work with," Wall said. "We can work more kinds of radio than anyone else."

Even though Field Day is considered a contest, there are no prizes of monetary value.

However, each ham accrues points and the winner is the person or group who makes the most contacts during the 24-hour period. For every contact made in the field, one point is awarded. If it is done in Morse code or digitally, two points are awarded.

"Having the GOTA station gets you points, running solar gets you points, talking to a satellite gets you a lot — the equivalent of talking to 50 people," Wall said. "Most of our points will come from bonuses. We do every bonus that we can."

To make a contact, the club logs the frequency, mode, date, time, station worked and exchanged received for each interaction. The Amateur Radio Relay League tracks these contacts through call signs, which each ham or group is given. The club's call sign is K4UCF.

"The call signs are translated over the radio in the International Phonetic Alphabet," Dick said.

The club finished fourth in the state in its category last year. The club is classified as 2A since it has two main stations and outdoor emergency power exclusively.

"It's pretty cool because it's the largest radio communications network in the world, and it's privately owned by citizens," Wall said.