[TWIAR] Airwaving: NC Ham club marks 75th

[Greg Williams]

People were coming in from all over yesterday to help celebrate the 75th 
birthday of the Forsyth Amateur Radio Club.

There were guests from Italy, Canada, Belgium, Poland and Sweden - to 
name just some of the countries. Someone checked in from nearly every 
state of the union.

All by radio, of course. While the club held an open house at its 
headquarters on Coliseum Drive for anyone who wanted to drop by, much of 
the party was celebrated over the airwaves.

"CQ Whiskey Four November Charlie, QR Zed," Ed Swiderski intoned over 
and over into a microphone, using a lingo that ham-radio operators 
everywhere understand. Translation: "Anyone out there? This is W4NC. Who 
is calling me?" Radio operators from elsewhere chimed in. Swiderski 
logged them on a computer screen beside his set.

W4NC are the call letters of the local club. Someone tapped Swiderski on 
the shoulder to get his attention, but he kept speaking into the 
microphone. When Swiderski is handling a "pileup" of incoming radio 
calls, he's in a world of his own. He has to focus on picking out call 
letters from the chatter so that he can properly log each caller in turn.

"When I have a lot of them, I want to work them and get a rhythm going," 
he said. "When I am in that mode, I want to work them, and everything 
else doesn't matter. I'm in a tunnel."

Swiderski is into DX - that's ham radio for contacting operators in 
distant stations. He has already logged connections to 296 of the 335 
countries, islands and other designated places on the ham-radio globe.

That's just one aspect of the hobby. A lot of people like to build their 
own equipment. Some like being able to help in a disaster - when the 
power is out and not even cell phones will work, "the airwaves are 
always there," said John Kippe, the ham-radio emergency coordinator for 
Forsyth County.

Ham-radio operators often get the call for help when nature misbehaves. 
Their radios can provide a communication system for emergency workers if 
the local systems are out of commission. Ham-radio operators can also 
pass messages back and forth so that family members can check on the 
well being of their loved ones.

Yesterday, Gary Carter fiddled with the knobs on his copy of a 1929 
transmitter set up to send Morse code. The radio puts out four watts - 
by comparison, commercial-radio WSJS in Winston-Salem has a 10,000-watt 
transmitter. Still, Carter has reached as far as Dallas with his set.

As Carter tapped out a message to someone who turned out to be just 
across town, bystanders remarked that experts can send Morse code at 60 
words a minute.

Nearby, Henry Heidtmann operated a 1950s-era set that was owned by his 
grandfather. Mercury vapor tubes glowed blue inside the set. When 
Heidtmann twiddles the knob, the set puts out a sound that could have 
gone into an episode of The Outer Limits. The set has a superior sound 
quality compared with modern ones, Heidtmann said.

"I love to listen at night to this all around the world," Heidtmann said.

Although the Internet has taken away some of the exotic thrill of tuning 
in to, say, Moscow, ham-radio fans say that there's nothing like being 
able to hear and talk with people in faraway places over the radio.

The hobby seems to appeal to the technically minded in particular. 
That's why Barbara Lawrence decided to bring her 12-year-old son Danny 
by the club yesterday. She wanted to see if ham radio is a hobby her son 
might want to explore.

Although the Internet has made worldwide communication easy, it has 
actually helped the ham-radio hobby rather than hurt it, club members 
said. In the past, if someone picked up a transmission from a 
particularly exotic spot, the only way to tell others about it would be 
to call them on the telephone. Now, the Internet can pass the word about 
who is on the air.

"I grew up in Davie County, in the rural part," said Don Edwards, 52, 
the club's president for 2006.

"At the time I was turning 10, you couldn't even have a private 
telephone - it was a party line. Radio was magic. It was absolute magic 
- the fascination of talking to people who were far away.