Amateur radio group dials up fun at annual field day

Walter Rupp was on a sailing vacation in Florida years ago when he received a call on his amateur radio and heard an interesting accent.

After a few minutes, the California resident realized the individual was from about 10 miles north of Paris, and the two chatted for a while.

“It’s an opportunity to speak to people all over the world,” said Rupp, who is a past treasurer, secretary and president of the St. Mary’s County Amateur Radio Association. “That’s fun for me.”

The club, which was formed in 1972, has 55 members between the ages of about 13 on up to Rupp, who is 91.

“I love it,” said Cary Brown of Callaway, who has been a member of the club since 2020. “It’s like being a detective and solving a puzzle or diagnosing a circuit problem or trying to find out what’s wrong and making it better. You’re able to push intellectual boundaries, things that you hadn’t thought about before. You get good ideas from somebody else, and with your math and science and you make something that maybe has never existed before.”

The club recently took part in its annual 24-hour field day at Historic Sotterley that was sponsored by the American Radio Relay League.

“We’re doing this to train ourselves [and] at the same time doing outreach,” Brown said.

Club member Abe Nehemias of Hollywood brought his daughters Sophie, 8, and Olivia, 6, to the event and they spent time checking connections and transmitters.

Sophie, who later tried to connect with a fellow amateur radio enthusiast in South Florida, said she was “having a lot of fun.”

Brown said members can often be found listening to other countries, getting news from Europe, or entertainment from places like South America or Mexico.

“Want to talk to an astronaut?” Brown asked. “OK.” He also added that in the case of an emergency like a hurricane or blackout, “We are the backup communications.”

Chris McGraw, who is a St. Mary’s County emergency coordinator with the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, said in just minutes his radio would be able to send emails and even attachments to help coordinate emergency response.

Member Sonae Geiger took part in an emergency training and decided amateur radio “would be a good skill to have. In the worst-case scenario it would be nice to be able to contact somebody across the globe. Just the experience of talking to people you don’t know, it’s fun.”

Geiger and her partner have an amateur radio base station in their home and plan to put one in the RV when they retire.

“Amateur radio started for people doing things that they loved because they were scientifically curious and they were pushing the boundaries beyond anything commercial research was handling,” Brown said. “When radio was first developed, you had a lot of very curious and interested people who formed a not-for-profit association with radio because it was amazing technology to be able to talk over miles and miles.”

He said amateur radio enthusiasts have also experienced amazing breakthroughs.

“All of the long-wave radio stations and the commercial radio stations were down below in the 200 khz range, so they had this range of 3mhz and above that they thought was basically worthless. But amateur radio operators went and started building their gear from scratch to get into these frequencies because they were curious,” Brown said. “They found out that under the right conditions a one-watt transmitter can transmit halfway around the world and that was totally unexpected because everybody thought radio [waves] went in a straight line.”

Brown's interests extend beyond what most people like.

“I love antennas. I think antennas are magical,” he said. “How can you take electricity that is running around a table from a battery, shoot it out into the air and have it come down someplace else and it makes sense to the person on the other end?”

The association — which Brown said “has a sense of community” — meets 7:30 p.m. on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum in Lexington Park.

For more information on the St. Mary’s County Amateur Radio Association, go to www.facebook.com/K3NHK/.