Bryan Amateur Radio Club participates in winter field day

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – For 24 hours amateur radio operators worldwide sent out signals and searched for them, including right here in Bryan.

It was for the yearly Winter Field Day Exercise which takes place on the last full weekend of January. This exercise helps amateur ham radio operators practice emergency communications and prepares them for situations such as freezing temperatures, ice, power outages, or other disasters. Amateur radio operators started sending out frequencies such as HF, VHF, or UHF bands at 1 p.m. on Saturday and concluded at 1 p.m. on Sunday.

The Bryan Amateur Radio Club participated in the exercise and set up radios, antennas, and generators and operated on the various frequencies and bands to test their skills.

“I was trying to send email messages over HF frequencies via Winlink and that’s another mode of operation that lets us send images, data, text over the HF,” Lorna Flansburg, treasurer for the Bryan Amateur Radio Club said. “We also have a gentleman back there doing CW which is Morse code, he’s got a key and he’s sending messages and receiving messages from other radio operators using CW.”

Flansburg said it’s very important to be able to use these types of communications if cell towers and landlines are lost during an emergency.

“Radio operations are just another piece of the tool kit,” Flansburg said. “We work with the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and with the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service to have qualified ham radio operators ready to volunteer,” Flansburg said.

The members of the club also get certified, have FCC licenses to operate on the radio, and go through the Incident Command System to receive accreditation,” Flansburg said.

“We man the radio room at downtown at the CEOC. We’re there every Friday checking the radio equipment, we have ham radios at the different hospitals in the area that we check on monthly to make sure they’re operational and if the need arises we can step in and assist with communications,” Flansburg.

Another field day, which will happen all around the world, will be held the last weekend of June.