When all else fails ham radio fills void

By Claudette Olivier
claudette.olivier@eunicetoday.com
When all else fails, there will always be ham.
“Everything moves with communication – cell phone, Internet, television,” said local ham radio operator Tom Dischler at the Eunice Rotary Club on Wednesday. “What would happen if they stopped tomorrow? How would we communicate?”
“Ham operators don’t rely on power. When all else fails, ham radio still works.”
Dischler spoke about the breakdown of communication following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and following the 2011 tornado that ravaged Joplin, Missouri.
“There are two very important things in every day life – communication and information to be passed along,” Dischler said. “After Hurricane Katrina, AT&T servers flooded in the bottom of a Hibernia Bank in New Orleans. Following Katrina, most of the information (from the city) was coming from ham operators.”
The radio operator recalled a story told to him in which a New Orleans hospital worker and several others were stranded at a hospital after the patients had been evacuated. The worker was able to get a text message through to his sister, who did not live in the area, and the woman asked her neighbor, a ham radio operator, if he could get word out that they needed help. Fifteen minutes after the ham operator took to the air, a helicopter retrieved the hospital workers.
“When the tornado hit Joplin, 7,500 buildings were destroyed,” Dischler said. “The tornado was on the ground for 15 minutes. There was no communication out of the town for 20 minutes except for one lone ham operator.”
“He used a metal lawn chair to make an antenna. He stayed on air for two and half days with no sleep getting rescue information out.”
In the last two weeks, Dischler has been listening to help calls from Nepal following the recent earthquake.
“There is nothing left there,” he said. “They are calling for help.”
Dischler is one of 25 licensed ham radio operators in Eunice and one of 700,000 in the United States. There are 2.9 million ham operators in the world, and Japan has the largest number of amateur radio operators. Dischler is associated with American Radio Relay League and the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and he is a member of the Acadiana Amateur Radio Association.
During his presentation, he gave some background on the history of ham radio, Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer in long-distance radio transmission and the outlawing of ham radio use during both world wars.
“By 1912, there was so much ham communication that the Radio Act was passed to regulate it,” Dischler said. “Operations stopped by law during WW I and II, but ham radio has been on ever since.”
According to Dischler, ham radio is used by many U.S. military families communicating with those stationed overseas as some corners of the world are still without satellite phones.
“You can even send photographs and spreadsheets around the world with a ham radio,” he said. “You can even can talk to the space station. They have an active ham radio on board.”
“There’s a group of people I talk to in Europe every night. Ninety-nine point nine percent of my contacts are in English. It’s a really easy hobby to get into.”
Ham radios start out at about $30 and can cost upwards of $8,000 depending on how much a person is looking to spend, and a ham radio license is $15.
Dischler’s own portable ham radio station includes a radio and a digital adapter, and the set up can run for 24 hours on one car battery, which he can recharge on a solar charging station.
“With this, a laptop and an 80 foot metal wire, I can be up and running in 30 minutes and can talk around the world,” he said.