Shortwave Hobbyists Have a Field Day to Make New Contacts

Hunched over a microphone, Frank Valdez was trying to talk by shortwave radio Saturday to anybody in the world who would listen.

In vain, Valdez repeated the San Fernando Valley Amateur Radio Club’s call sign: “whiskey six silver dollar.”

Through the jumble of static, Valdez briefly heard a ham operator talking in Connecticut, but missed the connection.

“He disappeared in the static, man,” said Valdez of Sun Valley. Other ham operators, gathered on a grassy knoll in the Sepulveda Basin, nodded in sympathy.

But Valdez and his friends would keep trying through the night to reach out and touch someone. It’s all part of a 24-hour “Field Day” staged by ham operators across the country to demonstrate their readiness to help with communications during disasters.

Clubs established communications centers in parks and parking lots and on remote mountaintops this weekend in an attempt to contact as many other ham operators as possible. The Valley group roped off a field with yellow and black tape to keep the curious from tripping over their wires. The club’s baby blue emergency generator kept the wide collection of equipment humming while the hams sipped sodas in tents and spun the radio dials for signs of intelligent life.

The Valley ham operators, who noted each successful outside contact on their logs, hope to reach more than 1,000 people by 11 a.m. today when the field day ends.

Many of the club members helped out during the days following last year’s earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. By radio, they received the names of earthquake survivors who could not reach working telephones but who wanted people in Los Angeles to know they were OK. The ham operators then tried to reach the family and friends in Los Angeles.

On Saturday, the operators did not pretend on the air that they were participating in a disaster, for fear of causing panic.

“We are capable of being heard throughout the world,” said Jamie Markowitz, an advertising executive. “We would start another ‘War of the Worlds,’ ” he said, referring to the panic caused by Orson Welles’ Halloween, 1938, radio show that pretended Martians had landed.

When they aren’t volunteering as humanitarians, many of the hobbyists are trying to reach like-minded folks across the globe.

Club members agreed that it’s easier now to talk with Eastern Bloc operators who used to speak cautiously before the wave of democracy washed through the formerly communist countries. In Romania, in fact, ham operators were treated as spies.

“You are much more free now. You can talk about more than the weather, your name and location,” without fear of endangering anyone who would respond from Eastern Europe, said Michelle Epstein.

Epstein and her husband have entertained Siberian and Finnish friends they have met through radio contact, and their daughter will be staying with other radio friends when she visits the Soviet Union this summer.

Perhaps another purpose of the weekend’s event was dispelling a stereotype.

“People have the misconception that ham operators are nerdy people. But it’s not true,” Markowitz said.

To back their claim, hams love to talk about the company they keep. Included among the approximately 1.5 million hobbyists internationally are Marlon Brando, King Hussein of Jordan, several Vatican priests and the president of Italy.

Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater chatted on his ham radio in 1964 on the day that he was trounced by President Johnson.

But certain things set the hams apart.

Many hams had high-tech walkie-talkies clipped to their belts. They wore their call signs on ball caps or belt buckles.

When they excitedly talked shop, deciphering it was about as easy as cracking the Morse code. And one ham’s Jeep Cherokee, with several antennae poking through the roof, looked like a rolling CIA relay station.