By Talya Flowers, StaffWriter, Dayton Daily News (Ohio)

EATON – The Preble Amateur Radio Emergency Services, which provides backup communications during natural disasters, will enhance its self-training skills by offering public demonstrations of its emergency capabilities at the Preble County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security on Saturday.

During the annual Field Day event sponsored by the American Radio Relay League, which is the national association for amateur radio, an estimated 35,000 radio operators nationwide will construct emergency stations from various places such as golf courses, malls, parks, schools, beaches and backyards around the country.

The 24-hour public demonstration for Preble County will begin on Saturday at 2 p.m.

“Our particular club uses this event to challenge ourselves to run off conventional power or by putting ourselves in places that we know will be tested in the event of a national or local emergency,” said Janeese Martin, public information officer for ARES.

“We just need to be prepared to go wherever we need to go.”

ARES was started in Preble County after 9 /11. Its job is to work closely with the National Weather Service, police and fire departments during power outages caused by tornadoes, hail or damaging wind, to communicate without the use of the Internet, cell towers or any other infrastructure that can be compromised during a natural disaster.

Martin said that with a receiver and a transmitter, power, radio waves, the right weather conditions and an antenna, contact can be made from around the world.

She added that the frequency (channel) that the operator is functioning on also will determine how contact is made.

Ham or amateur radio operators use a variety of voice, Morse code, images, text messages, television signals, analog or digital communications as well as data communications modes to make contact around the world.

They also have access to frequency allocations throughout the radio frequency spectrum, which enables communication across a city, region, country, and continent or even into space, according to Allen Pitts, media and public relations manager for the Amateur Radio Relay League.

“If the Internet goes down, we can still send email,” Pitts said. “We just send it radio to radio, a radio that is not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.”

Nationwide there are 700,000 licensed operators and more than 2.5 million around the world offering voluntary aid to emergency response agencies and non-emergency community services for free.

“We are called out for emergencies at the minimum every couple of months,” Martin said. “We are deployed throughout the country to keep an eye out on the weather. Letting the National Weather Service know that there is a tornado, hail or damaging wind, that way they can have eyes and ears on the ground.”

Ham radio operators have lent their emergency services during 9 /11, Hurricane Katrina, and to organizations such as Citizen Corps, FE-MA, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials as well as the National Weather Service, Pitts said.

News Center 7 Meteorologist Rich Wirdzek said that amateur radio operators were able to communicate on March 2when Henryville, Ind., had a tornado that caused a severe power outage.

Before the tornado hit, radio operators were able to warn weather services that the storm was coming. The tornado killed 24 people and injured hundreds more.

“SkyWarn has some of their best spotter reports from amateur radio operators. They rely on operators to give them ground truth,” Wirdzek said. “We are a Midwestern area for weather and it links the area together at an emergency standpoint. It’s another device of communication.

There really needs to be more people involved because communication when there is a natural disaster is really important.”

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