HAMMING IT UP ON THE AIRWAVES
HAM RADIO OPERATORS SEEK CONTACT IN FARAWAY LANDS.
Arthur White-Crummey
From his basement in White City, Stan Ewert dreams of contacting North Korea.
“That’s the rarest contact you can ever make,” he said.
Using his 200-watt radio transceiver, Ewert has spoken with ham radio operators from 285 “countries” — a category that includes dependencies and isolated territories like Alaska. But he hasn’t reached North Korea, the holy grail of the hobby. It’s a place only a handful of hams have ever heard from.
Ewert is one of an estimated 200 amateur radio enthusiasts in the Regina area. They call themselves hams, a term with obscure origins. They relish the thrill of tinkering with old equipment, helping out in disasters or, like Ewert, socializing with fellow hobbyists in faraway lands.
Many are retired. Ewert has been a ham for about 70 years. It runs in the family.
“My father was a ham,” he said. “My son is a ham as well. He carried on the family tradition.”
But Ewert finds that his grandchildren don’t have the same interest. “Our membership is definitely on the older side,” he said. But he thinks that would change if there were more people like Daniel Dion, a local science teacher who’s trying to rekindle passion for the hobby.
“It’s going to come back,” Dion said. “The future is wireless.”
This year, Dion started an amateur radio club at École Monseigneur de Laval, a french-language high school in north Regina. His goal is to get kids licensed so they can become radio operators. He figures he has two or three who are genuinely interested.
“I’m not going to interest all the students,” he admits. “It’s not for everyone. It’s for those kids that are interested in science.”
Zachary Morin-Barich is one of his keenest budding hams. For now, he has less ambitious dreams than Ewert. He wants to contact Germany, mostly because he likes the food.
“I like the fact that you get to talk to people from different places around the world,” the Grade 10 student said.
SUNSPOT BLUES
The ham radio world is at a low point right now. But it’s not the aging of his fellow operators that’s bothering Ewert — it’s the sun.
“We’re at the bottom of the sunspot cycle, which means that propagation isn’t as good as other times,” he said. “We can contact Canada and U.S. stations without any problem, but other countries ... it’s pretty seldom that they come through.”
Long-distance communication depends on bouncing signals off the ionosphere, he explains. But charged particles from the sun can interfere. Conditions change according to a regular rhythm, correlated with sunspots, over a period of 11 years.