Amateur radio club to participate in Field Day exercise

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Staff reports

GREENFIELD — The Hancock Amateur Radio Club will participate in the 24-hour national Field Day Exercise beginning at 2 p.m. June 27 and 28 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 515 Jefferson Blvd. The event is open to the public.

For more than 100 years, amateur radio — sometimes called ham radio — has allowed enthusiasts to experiment with electronics and communications techniques, as well as provide a free public service to their communities during disasters. Since 1933, ham radio operators across North America have established temporary ham radio stations in public locations during Field Day to showcase the science and skill of amateur radio.

Field Day demonstrates ham radio’s ability to work reliably under any conditions from almost any location and create an independent communications network not dependent on phone lines or the internet. More than 35,000 people from thousands of locations participated in Field Day in 2019.

HARC, was formed as a service to the local community to educate the youth and the public about amateur radio and electronics and to serve as a communication resource. During the exercise, one of the transmitters will be dedicated to mentoring non-licensed individuals and allowing them to get on the air.

The club also promotes the well-being of the community by providing communications for the public with the outside world in case of a local disaster, and it provides a team of trained weather observers to provide visual sightings of severe weather conditions in the county to the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.

Participants will be following CDC guidelines at the event.

Anyone may become a licensed amateur radio operator. There are more 761,300 licensed hams in the United States, as young as 5 years old and as old as 100. For more information, visit arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio or contact HARC president John Reeves at [email protected].