FAYETTEVILLE — While children her age communicate with others via text- or instantmessaging, fourth-grader Alison Stuart prefers her grandfather’s ham radio.

“You can hear the person’s voice,” 10-year-old Alison said as she prepared to take her Federal Communications Commission licensing exam for amateur radio operators Saturday afternoon.

She was the only child among 20 people who turned out for a morning training class at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville that preceded the afternoon exam.

Fayetteville was among a dozen hospital sites around the state offering the class through distance-learning technology, with the lesson beamed from a live classroom in Little Rock where the instructor, John Nordlund, was based.

The class and licensing exams were administered by the Arkansas Department of Health’s community hospital preparedness office. The department is trying to increase the numbers of trained, organized ham radio operators who can help during emergencies, such as storms, a pandemic disease outbreak or bioterrorism attack.

Ham radios have a frequency range from 1. 8 MHz up through the UHF and VHF frequencies and beyond.

“We’re scattered into little band segments, literally across the entire spectrum,” Nordlund said.

“I’ve just been around it pretty much all of my life,” said Alison, a pupil at Forest Heights Elementary School in Harrison. She said the airwaves allow her to talk with interesting people nationwide.

Brian Wilson, a registered nurse at Washington Regional’s emergency room, is in charge of the hospital’s emergency preparedness command center, where a ham radio is set up.

Wilson and the hospital’s safety officer, Mel Lopes, said recent large-scale disasters such as Hurricane Katrina have led hospitals to take extra precautions.

When telephone and power lines and television cables are down and mobile channels overloaded, hospitals and other emergency responders might have to lean hard on a network of ham radio operators, Lopes said.

Still, the country’s network of operators for ham radio, also called amateur radio, has declined over the years, Lopes said, with FCC statistics putting the latest number at 722, 382.

Nordlund, the Health Department’s tactical communications assistant coordinator, said the state ham database shows more than 7, 000 licensed operators.

“But in truth, probably less than half of those are active,” Nordlund said.

That’s because the licenses are good for 10 years, and the database doesn’t track operators who lose interest, move away or die.

When Burnie Joe Dunn of Farmington first became involved with ham radio in the late 1950 s, it was primarily a recreational activity.

A few years later, Dunn, 69, got busy with career and family. In the intervening years, ham radio became more of an activity for amateurs who help out during emergencies. He resumed ham operating in 2004, and now he’s accredited through the American Radio Relay League to administer the FCC amateur radio license examinations.

“Let me give you an example of how this works,” Dunn said Saturday in the Fayetteville hospital’s command center, as he began sketching a diagram on a napkin.

He drew a curved line, with dots for the Fayetteville area on the right end and the National Weather Service in Tulsa on the left, and beams representing weather radar radiating toward the Fayetteville end.

“With that radar, due to the curvature of the Earth, they can see those storm tops, but they can’t see ground level,” said Dunn, who is among a dozen or so ham radio volunteers in the Fayetteville area on an active network that works with meteorologists and ham operators in other regions.

“That’s what we’re doing — we report those ground conditions that are under the radar scope back to the National Weather Service.”

Sours: www.nwanews.com