Hamming It Up in Arizona

AMATEUR RADIO OPERATORS

TEXT BY KATHLEEN WALKER PHOTOGRAPHS HE IS A WELL-KNOWN DESERT DWELLER who once helped save a couple on a boat lost off the coast of Mexico.

"I got in touch with the Coast Guard," he says, "and told them approximately where they were."

He heard their call of distress because of his involvement in amateur radio. The man is a "ham" in the finest sense of the word, one of 12,000 Arizonans licensed to operate, to communicate, on radio frequencies reserved for amateurs.

"My handle is Barry," he says firmly. "Bravo Alpha Romeo Romeo Yankee." The other half of the name is Goldwater.

Doris Rieke has some stories of her own to tell. A ham since 1979, she operates out of her home southwest of Tucson. Following the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, commercial communications in and out of the disaster area were in chaos, but Rieke was able to get in via ham radio. She relayed names and addresses of loved ones from concerned Tucsonans to a ham in Mexico City. Hours later he would call back with whatever information he had been able to obtain about their welfare.

"Not a big thing," is how Rieke quietly describes the help she has rendered across the years to people who have never seen her face or shaken her hand.

READY TO REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE IN AN EMERGENCY

Cathy Wasmann's stories come from the mountains and lakes of Pima County. She is a ham and a member of the all-volunteer Southern Arizona Rescue Association. Ask her when ham radio last made a difference in rescue work and she's likely to say, "Last night. This morning."

She talks about the couple who took a wrong turn in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. "They had not come down the trail," she explains. "They'd gone up the trail and hiked well into the mountains."

Others waiting below finally called for help. Wasmann used ham radio to coordinate communications for the successful rescue.

She also used it on a trip she took with friends to explore caves in the Sierritas. One of the group injured his shoulder. Using ham radio, Wasmann was able to get help.

Says Wasmann about Arizona hams, "The support among the radio community for search and rescue is overwhelming."

Arizona is not unique in its ham radio operators' willingness to assist. Providing service, particularly in times of emergency, is one of the stated purposes of the hobby. In addition, amateur radio must be just that amateur. There can be no profit, no charge, no commercial aspect in its operation.

"We don't do it because it gets us anything," says Dr. Warren Hill of Mesa. "We do it because it's nice to do."

One of the contributions he was able to make through his involvement was to arrange for free air transportation and free medical treatment in Arizona for an ailing fellow ham in Albania.

But Arizona is unique in one sense of amateur radio. It has to do with the land itself, those vast stretches cut and bordered by mountain ranges. Len Winkler hosts a nationally syndicated radio show about ham radio which broadcasts out of Phoenix. He calls Arizona "one of the best areas for amateur radio, bar none, in the country.

"All those mountains have amateur radio repeaters on top of them which enables us to have fantastic communications," he enthuses.

Repeaters are electronic packages that receive signals on one frequency and send them out simultaneously on another. They make it possible to get past the limitations of VHF/UHF transmission. Radio waves on these frequencies work on a "line of sight" basis, an unobstructed view between two amateur radio antennas and you have communication. A man-made or natural obstruction between them and the connection is cut. In addition there is a limit of range depending on the size of the antenna.

But place a repeater on one of those high Arizona mountains and

But you get above the problems. That means members of a search and rescue team might be behind a jog in the Catalinas, or down in a canyon, but if they are within line of sight of the mountaintop Mount Lemmon repeater or one of many others in the Tucson area, they can stay in touch via amateur radio. And not only are they able to Talk to each other, they are connected into an entire community of hams ready to help.

With hundreds of repeaters operating throughout Arizona, Hartley Gardner of Phoenix, a ham since 1967, can state confidently, "There's always someone out there."

He has a lot to do with that. In 1984 he and five other amateur radio operators further extended the reach of Arizona amateur radio using those same mountains as well as tapping into the height benefits of the structures civilization has created.

They placed repeaters from Yuma to Page. They crowned South Mountain, Tower Mountain, Mount Ord, Mingus Mountain, Bill Williams Mountain, and Navajo Mountain in Utah. They also hit the top of Telegraph Pass in the southwest corner of the state, Grand Canyon National Park to the north, and utilized the reach of a skyscraper in downtown Phoenix.

They created Northlink, a linked communication system. Talk to one of the repeaters, talk to them all. Be stranded on the side of a road near Jerome, holding a wrench in one hand while crossing the fingers of the other, people from Flagstaff to Yuma will know about it and consider it their duty to respond.

This "open" system, which is not restricted to a dues-paying membership, is one of several covering the state. Another is the Zia Connection, which moves messages from Yuma, Arizona, to Midland and Odessa, Texas, from Tucson to Albuquerque, Albuquerque to El Paso.

If you are out on that road or down the beaten path, these links can get you past problems inherent in other mobile communication systems. Reach one of the repeaters in the chain and you have an extensive range of communication, a number of people listening, and you don't have to pay for the call.

It is a situation not easy to duplicate in states without the Arizona topography that allows us an easy communication hop, obstruction free, from mountaintop to mountaintop.

Says Gardner, "If you tried to do a link across Kansas, you'd need a 600-foot tower every 30 miles."

AMATEUR RADIO OPERATORS

Arizona also has the added benefit of ease of access because of the small number of users when balanced against the hundreds of repeaters scattered throughout the state and those linked systems. There is not only room to roam in Arizona, there is room to talk.

There is also room for more hams, and the hobby has become, in the past few years, more membership friendly. Not that it was ever restricted to any one group. Doris Rieke's introduction to the hobby in the late 1970s ended her own misconceptions about its membership.

"Before that I thought ham radio operators were 14-year-old boys on the East Coast who saved sinking ships."

They were, they are, and they do. But amateur radio is gender friendly, age friendly, and disability friendly. Rieke, in her 60s, has been blind for 40 years, which is absolutely immaterial when she responds to a call on the Zia link from over in New Mexico."

"They get stuck in the snow in Deming," explains Rieke. "They say, 'Would you call my family in Tucson? Would you call DPS [Department of Public Safety]'? Yes, she would.

Still there have been elements of the hobby that did limit membership since they started working those "wireless" radios back in the early 1900s. One was the need to know Morse Code.

"The thing that's held most people from getting a license is code," says Larry Pace, Tucson ham. "They either cannot do it, or they're scared they can't do it."

That has changed. As of 1991, you can earn an entry-level amateur radio license without knowing Morse Code. And, for those who do not feel themselves to be technically inclined to the point of yearning for a room full of radios and a car full of antennas, technology has provided an option. There are now small, simple-to-use handheld radios.

They won't put you in touch with the world. That still takes those radio "shacks" full of wires and static, those towers, the technological ability to pop high-frequency waves off the ionosphere and into another continent. But in Arizona that hand-held, connecting with a repeater, may get you out of a canyon, off a ledge, or simply put you in touch with a few good people who feel like a chat.

There is also another connection to be made a connection with history. There is a theory about certain hilltop sites throughout central and southern Arizona. The Hohokam, the ancient people of this land, built towns and cities upon them, lived out their lives on them. From their heights, they commanded not only magnificent views but also the respect of those who approached.

Some archaeologists consider it possible that this choice of hill sites may have been based on more than esthetics and security. They may have met another human need, that of communication.

Tumamoc Hill south of Tucson was once a city of hundreds of people. Stand atop it with Dr. Paul Fish, curator of archaeology for the Arizona State Museum, and he will point out Martinez Hill to the south and Linda Vista Hill to the north. Both were inhabited at the same time as Tumamoc.

"We can see them both," he states. "So it would work."

It would be possible to maintain line of sight communication between the high settlements using smoke or a reflective surface. And, as Todd Bostwick, city archaeologist for Phoenix, says of the settlements he studies in the central part of the state, "Often there is a chain of them you can follow."

Therefore, he is willing to theorize, messages may have been passed from one hill site to another, down a chainlike pattern of prehistoric settlements. A linked communication system.

Hundreds of years later, a modern link across the land of Arizona brings the voice from New Mexico into a home southwest of Tucson.

"Good afternoon, Doris. You're surely looking good in Deming," comes the call.

Another voice adds, "Just wanted to let you know that you're coming in here in beautiful Cloudcroft."

Down in Green Valley, a gentleman passes on the news that a heavy rainstorm has just moved through.

"Which way this rain coming from?" asks a man in Amado.

"From above," comes the dry-as-desert reply.

Southwest of Tucson, Doris Rieke has to laugh. A connection has been made.