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JPLers 'ham' it up
Re-posted with permission from the JPL Institutional Communications Office.
Originally posted July 15, 2008 on the JPL internal news website The Daily Planet.
By Brian Frank
The afternoon of the last Saturday in June, Mike Tope was curled up and napping under a table in the upstairs lounge of Caltech’s Winnett Center, exhausted after a long week of work. He had arrived earlier to help other members of JPL’s amateur radio club get acquainted with Caltech’s transceivers, and he would stay well into the night to compete in Field Day, a 24-hour nationwide competition among ham operators hosted each year by the American Radio Relay League.
After a few hours of catch-up sleep, he took a seat at one of the four operator stations in the cramped rooftop radio shack, donned a headset, and started transmitting in search of other hams.
“CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day, this is Whiskey-6-Victor-India-Ocean, W-6-Victor-India-Ocean.”
Soon came a scratchy reply: “W-6-Victor-India-Ocean, this is Kilowatt-6-Romeo-Mike-Romeo. We are 1-Alpha-Orange, QSL.”
“QSL the 1-Alpha-Orange. The exchange here is 3-Echo Los Angeles, 3-Echo Los Angeles.”
Tope entered the other station’s information into a log displayed on his computer screen: call sign K6RMR, contest class 1A, transmitting from Orange. One more contact, one more point.
Tope estimates the JPL team made about 900 contacts that day, which is well below last year’s mark of 2,035, but they had a lot going against them.
An eleven-year low in sunspot activity poses a problem for hams. Most of their communication relies on bouncing signals off the ionosphere to reach fellow hams on the other side of the country – or the world. Sunspots increase the intensity of the ionosphere, making it a better mirror for radio waves. Remove that mirror, however, and the signals just shoot off into space instead of reflecting back to Earth.
And turnout for the annual event was light this year due to a last-minute change in location. Normally, the JPL hams haul a trailer full of gear up to Mt. Gleason and erect an elaborate farm of antennas. It’s a camping and ham radio jamboree that everyone looks forward to. This year, an unusually high risk of wildfires made the Mt. Gleason site impractical, sending the team instead to the radio shack at Caltech.
But success isn’t necessarily measured by the number of contacts. After a major hurricane, earthquake, or even terrorist strike, ham operators are often the first to establish backup communications, helping to get messages into and out of the affected area. Field Day is ultimately an emergency readiness drill, and it gives them a chance to dust off and test their antennas, radios, and gas-powered generators.
“The commercial power fails and you want to communicate with your amateur radio equipment and you find out the battery doesn’t work or I don’t have the right connector to hook the battery to the radio,” says Tope, who works on the landing radar for Mars Science Laboratory and moonlights as a ham. “These are the kinds of things you learn in the Field Day event so that when the real thing happens, you’re actually prepared for it.”
Last year overall more than 34,000 hams competed across the nation, and this year the national association expected the number to be even higher. That’s a lot of stations, making for a lot of potential interference.
And that’s exactly the point, “to operate in sort of a chaotic environment,” Tope says. “There’s background noise, the generator’s running, people are talking and you’re trying to focus.” It’s meant to simulate post-disaster confusion and mayhem.
Field Day is also a reminder that the JPL Amateur Radio Club’s 27 dues-paying members may be hobbyists, but they’re an important part of the Lab’s emergency response plan, too.
Even if a major disaster knocked out all telecommunications, ham operators could still patch through to other operators on-Lab, across the county, even across the country. JPL hams would provide a critical resource by serving as the ears and mouth of the disaster management team.
“They play a big part in emergency communications for the lab,” says emergency preparedness administrator Eric Fuller, who adds that club members have drilled with JPL’s volunteer urban search-and-rescue team in the past. For a simulation in which the Lab lost all communications, each team was assigned a ham operator who relayed damage assessment information and instructions to and from the disaster management team.
That kind of communication can and does save human lives, but JPL has the unique responsibility of protecting its spacecraft, as well.
“One of the really crucial things they do for us is, in the emergency operations center, they can talk to Goldstone, part of the Deep Space Network,” Fuller says. “Should everything go down, we can actually send packet messages out to Goldstone for spacecraft commands. So [the club is] actually a backup between JPL and Goldstone.”
But whether they’ve a mind for service or an interest in developing work-related technical skills, many of our JPL hams are still hobbyists at heart.
“I’ve been doing this kind of stuff since I was 13, so there’s kind of a nostalgia aspect for me,” Tope says. “I just really enjoy getting on the radio and talking to people all over the country—or all over the world, depending on the activity. To hear the weak signals coming in from all over the United States simultaneously is kind of cool.”
Those signals are actually messages, and though they can sound cryptic or even cliquish to the non-hams among us, all that code-talk is really just shorthand for the most common and useful radio phrases. It’s similar to (and predates) the way online socialites shorten their chat-room text or instant messages—BRB for “be right back,” LOL for “laughing out loud.” Common radio codes include QSL for “do you copy,” QSO for “conversation,” and 73, a friendly sign-off.
“A lot of these abbreviations in the ham community come from Morse code operators, because it’s easier to send two letters—DX—instead of ‘distance,’” says James McDuffie, the club’s secretary and a software engineer for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
Whiskey-6-Victor-India-Ocean, which Tope and the other JPL hams repeated thousands of times during Field Day, is actually the call sign of JPL’s station, W6VIO. Since it can be difficult to discern similar-sounding letters such as ‘s’ and ‘f’ even when transmitting via clear channels, operators replace them with whole words using the phonetic alphabet.
The club switched from their old marble-mouth call sign WA6DKJ to the new designation in 1969 in honor of the original W6VIO, former club president Jack Blindsbury. Later, during special commemorative broadcasts, club members playfully referred to their call sign as W-6-Viking-In-Orbit, or W-6-Voyager-In-Outerspace.
Despite some ups and downs over the years, the club continues to thrive. The official results from this year’s contest are due to be published in the December issue of QST, the American Radio Relay League’s magazine. Though JPL likely placed lower this year than last, when they were 12th in their class nationwide, the JPL hams still achieved their primary goal of practicing under emergency conditions.
And for those still wondering why they’re called hams, the most widely-accepted view is that “ham” was once used as a pejorative for an incompetent person. Early professional telegraphers would get upset when these non-experts created interference on their channels and would not-so-gently tell the “hams” to get off the radio.
Nowadays you might rest easier knowing they’re out there every day, riding the airwaves, staying in practice for the next big quake. 73.