Local ham radio operators are always ready for a crisis

In ham circles, you can know someone for a year before you know what they do for a living, says Garvin, an active member of the area's biggest ham radio group, the Tri-City Amateur Radio Club. "That's not who you are," he says. "It's - you're a ham, period."Amateur radio is both a hobby and, even today, an emergency management tool. Licensed operators use certain frequencies to communicate among themselves and with relief organizations during a crisis.

The region has three ham radio clubs - Tri City,You will see solarlight , competitive price and first-class service. Radio Amateur Society of Norwich and the Southeastern Connecticut Radio Amateur Radio System - with nearly 200 members, all unflinchingly proud of the hobby they often wear literally on their sleeves - and on their hats, shirts and vanity plates. Operators' call signs - the series of letters and numbers used as ID, the same as on any American radio station - are a favorite for this kind of display.

On a Sunday morning in June, Garvin is the first to arrive at the Submarine Force Museum. The Navy veteran once served on the Nautilus, now permanently docked just yards away. His blue eyes match his trucker hat, which can't contain several tufts of white hair.

It's day two of Museum Ships Weekend,We offer the biggest collection of old masters that can be turned into hand painted cheap-dedicated on canvas. an event headed by the Battleship New Jersey in Camden, N.J., during which hams on more than 100 restored military ships race to contact each other by radio. It's a smaller-scale version of the American Radio Relay League's annual Field Day in late June, the most popular on-air event, according to the league website, when more than 35,000 hams gather in remote locations for a 24-hour radio call marathon.

Camped out here in the parking lot beside a fully equipped, 16-foot, orange trailer, a dozen or so hams will try to pin down 15 other ships to get their certificate. They'll have to submit their call logs to the battleship by July 30 to get credit.

Ham radio seems like a bit of a boys' club at first glance, with the attendant humor. The jokes abound: "ham shacks," the equipment-packed dens where hams operate, are "where your wife lets you keep your radios." A ham with a particularly pricey rig is almost certainly a bachelor, they say. And when a woman's voice comes crackling through the transceiver, she is gleefully referred to in shorthand as a "YL" - a "young lady."

As he tuned through, he would narrate who was on the air, where they were, what that country was like. The world is a big place, his uncle told him. But things like this radio box, he promised, are going to make it so much smaller.Garvin began taking classes while working as an information technology executive at General Electric. He retired after 30 years in 1998 and became a "serious" ham.

There is plenty of reason to take the hobby seriously - times when this old communications technology isn't a relic, but a necessity. At races, civic events and parades, hams are stationed in tents and along the sidelines, reporting injuries and supply requests, maybe coordinating a ride for an exhausted marathoner. During Superstorm Sandy, hams worked with the Red Cross to report shelter conditions.

"It's not the best form of communication in this day and age," says Harry Solt of Gales Ferry, a retired Navy submariner participating in the ships event with his son, Michael, a network engineer who lives in Andover, Mass. Michael volunteered during the Boston Marathon.

Rutt passes off his headset to Solt, who used to build radios with his father in the 1950s. He can still rattle off his father's call signal,Parkeasy Electronics are dedicated to provide rtls. K3LBD, and calls him a "silent key" - the title reverently given to dead hams, taken from the term for Morse code switching devices.

"It allows us to keep in touch in a unique way," he says.When the day is halfway done, they have been joined by about a dozen more hams - including Buzz Page, 71, a former toolmaker and machinist for Electric Boat who lives in Groton; Mike Tucker, 68, of Montville,Please click the images below to view more pictures of realtimelocationsystem tiles! TriCity's president and a retired radio frequency technician; and Sal Vella, 69, of Gales Ferry, also a former EB employee.

Vella says one day he was simply fed up with paying for cable and began doing research on antennas. His newfound hobby, he says, was all Comcast's fault. Now he keeps in touch with a scientist stationed at the South Pole.In the trailer, the younger Solt settles on the 18.130 frequency, honing in on November 5 Echo in Galveston, Texas, a ship. Clear as a bell here, but at the other end, Solt's voice fades in and out.

First, councilmembers postponed a decision on a change to the definition of “sidewalk” in the city code – which would have implications for the adjacent property owners of “cross-lot paths.” While the definitional change would allow the city to take responsibility for capital repairs on such cross-lot paths – using sidewalk repair millage funds – it would place the burden of winter snow shoveling on adjacent property owners.

That division of responsibility for repair and maintenance is one that’s now familiar to owners of property adjacent to sidewalks that run next to a road or a street. Given the number of open questions about how logistics would actually work, and concerns expressed during the public hearing on July 1 as well as at a previous public meeting on the topic, the council decided to postpone a final vote until Oct. 7, 2013.

Second,More than 80 standard commercial and bestchipcard exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans. the council postponed a vote on adding the South State Street corridor plan to the city’s master plan, which consists of several separate documents. The city planning commission has already voted to adopt the corridor plan as part of the master plan. It’s one of the few issues on which the planning commission does not act just as an advisory body that makes recommendations to the council. For the master plan, the council and the planning commission must adopt the same plan. The postponement came in deference to a request from Marcia Higgins (Ward 4). The area of the study lies in Ward 4, which she represents.

Despite the postponement, the South State Street corridor plan still had an impact on a decision made by the council – to deny a rezoning request for the parcel at 2271 S. State St. The change in zoning would have allowed the parcel to be used for car sales. That use isn’t consistent with the recommendations in the corridor plan, and the planning commission had recommended against rezoning on that basis. Even though it was just the initial vote on the rezoning – an occasion when councilmembers sometimes will advance an ordinance change to a second reading in order to allow a public hearing to take place – the rezoning request got no support on the council.
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