A bunch of hams

“KA0YKC. You around, Martin?”

Bob Crawford sat at his dining room table as he spoke his call sign and his question into his handheld radio.

There was a pause. Then a voice broke through the speaker.

"KC0DUA. I'm here." It was Martin Shawler, a fellow Creston ham operator.

“Yeah, roger,” Crawford said. “I’ve got Ian Richardson, the newspaper guy, at my house, and I’m showing him how our radios work and talking to him about our club and everything.”

The two exchanged a few more sentences before Crawford bid Shawler “73,” which is hamspeak for “best regards,” and signed off.

Crawford and Shawler are two of several ham, or amateur, radio operators who are members of the Southwest Iowa Amateur Radio Association (SWIARA), an organization that began in the 1970s and remains very active in Creston today. With about 20 members from Union and the surrounding counties, the group helps during disaster situations, parades and, for the first time this year, the KSIB Tractor Ride.

“Like going fishing”

Crawford has personally been operating ham radios for more than four decades. He started as a Military Auxiliary Radio System operator in the Marines during the Vietnam War. Now, the 72-year-old Creston School driver and crossing guard uses it mainly as a hobby, tinkering with his radio and seeing who might be broadcasting on different frequencies.

“It’s kind of like going fishing,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re going to catch.”

Over the past 43 years, Crawford has talked with ham operators throughout the world, and he has a scrapbook of postcards they’ve sent him afterward. There are cards from Japan, France, Puerto Rico, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia and Italy, to name a few.

What does he talk about when he makes contact?

“You just talk about what’s going on, what their country’s like, what our country’s like, our freedoms, their freedoms and stuff like that,” he said.

Crawford helped restart SWIARA in 1986 and is a former president and vice president of the club. During his first few years with SWIARA, the club raised funds through garage sales and a raffle to purchase a new repeater, a device that retransmits radio signals at higher power so they can cover longer distances. The club’s repeater currently sits atop the KSIB tower and is linked with several other nearby repeaters, allowing ham operators throughout southwest Iowa to communicate directly with each other.

SWIARA currently has about 20 members, Crawford said, and they meet once a month in the Alliant Energy Building at 208 W. Taylor St., as well as some Saturday mornings for coffee.

When disaster strikes

Ham radio is more than just a hobby for Crawford, however. He and the majority of the association’s members participate with Skywarn, a network of amateur radio operators that watch the skies and report inclement weather conditions to the National Weather Service.

“They really fulfill an important public safety role,” Jo Duckworth, Union County Emergency Management coordinator, said. “They relay local information to the National Weather Service. Also, if I would lose my ability to communicate with like the SEOC (State Emergency Operations Center), they would be able to.”

Since the ham operators are equipped with radios in their vehicles and battery-powered handsets, and since their repeater has a backup generator, the association is able to intervene when power goes down.

Duckworth said a recent time when SWIARA was able to help in the aftermath EF2 tornado that ripped through the northwest portion of Creston in April 2012.

“They helped with communications at the hospital and also here at my office after we finally got the EOC (Emergency Operations Center) open,” Duckworth said. “We lost our comm center for awhile — not for very long, thank heavens — but I knew if we didn’t get back up I had the people to help cover that gap.”

And when Creston’s bus barn was destroyed in that storm, SWIARA helped install the bus drivers’ repeater on their own tower, so the drivers could still communicate by radio.

“We dug their repeater out of the rubbish and took it out and put it on our tower out there at the KSIB FM tower and got it back in order,” Roger Nurnberg, club secretary and treasurer, said.

Nurnberg became involved with amateur radio during the late 1980s, when he was a training officer at Creston Fire Department, and he said it’s the emergency intervention part of ham radio, which he calls the “meat and potatoes,” that keeps him involved.

Other functions

While emergencies are an important function of the club, Nurnberg said SWIARA also helps in less threatening situations, like setting up their radios at parades and biking events.

“It’s kind of a safety type of thing and coordination,” Nurnberg said. “We make sure people go where they’re supposed to go.”

On June 6, SWIARA will be volunteering at the KSIB Tractor Ride. This will be the club’s first year working in that capacity.

For those interested in getting started with ham radio, Nurnberg said membership and the meetings are open to anyone. He said the club wants to help people get ham licenses and become involved.

“One of our missions of our club is to assist people in getting their license, and in fact we even furnish them with study materials just to help them promote that,” Nurnberg said. “We have a lot of fellows who will buddy up with one of the members and we have several members who are very well-versed.”