North Shore Radio Club to Practice Emergency Communication June 24-25

Libertyville, IL - June 14, 2022 - The members of the North Shore Radio Club will celebrate Field Day with hundreds of thousands of amateur radio operators all over North America on June 25th and 26th. The event is a combination emergency-preparedness exercise, remote operations test, public relations event, and club social. Clubs and individuals fire up their power generators and charge their batteries and put their radios on the air from 1 pm Saturday to 1 pm Sunday, to make radio contacts with other participants.

The North Shore Radio Club will set up four separate stations at Clarkson Park in Northfield, IL. The event normally draws well over 120 participants. The public is welcome, and will be able to see all parts of the operation in action. The public is also invited to operate on a specific radio station set up for them.

This year's club event, is the first to have stations outdoors since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. This offers NSRC members an opportunity to practice communicating from an outdoor site with temporary antennas and emergency power sources. The intent is to communicate with as many participating stations in the US and Canada, as possible.

To make contacts with other amateur stations around the country, the team will transmit signals by voice, Morse code, and digitally in a mode known as FT8 or FT4. One of the stations will be set up for use by non-hams, who want to try out this form of communication, with help from a licensed ham. This is the "Get On The Air" or GOTA station and will be available both days

To power the stations, they plan to use a gasoline-powered generator as would be done in an emergency when community electrical power might not be available. That is a primary objective of Field Day, to ensure that their radio equipment would be ready to send and receive messages in a real emergency,

2022 marks the 84th annual Field Day event. It was started in 1933 by the ARRL, the national association for radio amateurs, and has been held every year since then, except for the years 1942 - 1946, when amateur radio was suspended during WW II. There are currently more than 800,000 licensed radio amateurs in the U.S., who donate the equivalent of millions of dollars per year providing emergency and public service communications.

For more information about Field Day, the North Shore Radio Club, or amateur radio in general, visit the club's website, NS9RC.org.