Beverly Hills Pupils ‘Ham’ It Up, but It’s All in Name of Education

Two years ago, Craig Dible’s students at Horace Mann Elementary School in Beverly Hills began eavesdropping on the world.

Dible, a 42-year-old social studies teacher, bought a shortwave radio for his class as an experiment. Antennas were put on the roof, and the class became known as the school’s listening post. Students dutifully monitored broadcasts from London, Moscow, Tokyo, Washington, Havana, Seoul and other places. In addition to the international broadcasts, they also tuned in local police, fire and emergency medical frequencies.

Now, after monitoring thousands of broadcasts, Dible says that “a number of my listeners (students) have become interested in becoming talkers as well.”

With $3,000 in state grant funds, he purchased radio transmitting equipment. Six of his students have passed the strict FCC novice licensing tests, joining the more than 400,000 Americans who are amateur radio operators known as “hams,” and three more students plan to take the test soon. In all, about 40 of his students are using the radio equipment.

It’s a lot of fun, said Mark Rosenfeld, 12, who received his radio operator’s license last month. “I hope to buy my own transmitting equipment one day.”

Licensed students are allowed to broadcast using low-powered, hand-held radio transmitters with a limited range. It’s possible to boost the range of the broadcast over greater distances by relaying the relatively weak radio signal to one of several powerful mountaintop transmitters located nearby.

Rosenfeld, like other students who have licenses, has received call letters--a code to identify himself when he broadcasts. So far, his conversations with other radio operators have consisted of asking the identity and the location of the broadcasts and the weather.

There have been no Maydays from someone in distress so far, Dible said.

To get a license, an applicant must answer 30 questions about radio operations and be able to send and receive five words a minute in Morse code.

“The hardest part of the test is passing the code,” Dible said, who added that the requirement is outdated. “It is like having to pass a horse-riding test to get a driver’s license,” he said.

The novice license, issued to a beginning operator, was recently upgraded by the FCC to allow communication by voice rather than code.

Dible said the decision by the Federal Communications Commission is part of a push to make the license more attractive to amateurs. “Ham radio used to be popular, but in recent years it has been considered a dying hobby because of competition with computers and other technical hobbies.”

Dible obtained his license only two years ago.

He said that he wants to encourage students to “listen to current events as they happen, without editing or interpretation by someone else.”

His students had discussed Japanese reaction to President Reagan’s proposal to impose tariffs on products produced in Japan after Dible listened to the reaction in English-language broadcasts from that country. Reagan since then has imposed tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic companies.

Last year, he said his class was listening in as Mission Control announced the launch of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger. “We heard the announcer say that something was wrong, but he said it like he did not believe his equipment,” he said.

Dible also taped broadcast reports of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. “Our broadcasts were actually the worst, predicting that thousands of people would die. Moscow was the opposite; they said that it was a very minor problem. Actually, the British Broadcasting Co. was the most balanced version.”