LIVINGSTON, Mont. — There are not many hobbies where you can relay messages for emergency personnel during an unfolding disaster one day, talk to astronauts on the International Space Station another, then talk to your buddies in Morse code at a rate of 35 words per minute, well, every day.
But that's Shields Valley resident Doug Dunn's hobby.
Dunn, a retired 65-year-old, is an amateur radio — more commonly known as "ham radio" — operator. And like so many ham radio aficionados around the world, he is passionate about the hobby.
A small den in Dunn's home 16 miles north of Livingston is dominated by radio gear. On a recent afternoon, it crackled with activity as Dunn, whose call sign is K7YD, communicated with friends using voice and rapid-fire Morse code, tapped out at a blinding pace on a semi-automatic Morse key set — the descendant of the old telegraph set of the 1800s.
Antennas — seven in all — bristle from Dunn's roof and yard. More ham radio gear is crammed into his pickup truck, a vehicle with 300,000 miles on it that Dunn says he can't replace because he's put too much work into it installing mobile ham radio equipment.
"We're all radio nuts," Dunn said of the fellowship of ham radio operators, or "hams," as they're known.
"Most of what I need I build," he said, joking, "It's a sickness for me."
Ham radio uses a multitude of frequencies across the VHF, UHF, HF and even microwave bandwidths. Operators must take and pass a Federal Communications Commission test to acquire a license, and cannot use the radio for business purposes. Bouncing signals off the ionosphere, ham radio can reach around the world.
Signals transmit better at night, when the sun's effect on the atmosphere diminishes.
Ham radio is not to be confused with citizen band radio, which uses far less powerful equipment for communicating over shorter distances, requires no license and uses only a limited number of channels.
Dunn, who's been a ham since he was 14 years old, is not the only operator in Park County — there are about 40 others — but by his reckoning, he is the only active one.
Dunn's hobby has two facets. He uses it to talk to friends around the region and the world but also to relay emergency communications when disasters strike.
And in that regard, Dunn is not just any radio operator — he's the state coordinator for 400 ham radio operators who can provide emergency communications for the state Disaster and Emergency Services. He also works directly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, on emergency communications.
Locally, he's the go-to guy for Park County Disaster and Emergency Services, providing emergency communications and technical help with everything from telephones to radio repeater towers.
"I call him my emergency communications person," said Belinda Van Nurden, safety coordinator for the county DES. "No matter what goes wrong with communications, I call Doug, and he can fix it."
She recalled one winter when a storm knocked out a repeater on a hill outside Livingston.
"He went up in the middle of a blizzard" and fixed the problem, she said.
"Ham radio is a public service," Dunn said. "We're here to serve when all else fails."
And there's plenty that can fail. Standard emergency personnel radios can go down or not have the reach ham radios have. Likewise, cell phone coverage in far-flung emergencies can be nonexistent.
Standard radios and cell phones depend on microwave towers to transmit their signal, Dunn said, and even the smallest earthquake can knock out the towers' alignments.
"Our motto is, 'When All Else Fails,'" Dunn said.
He cited a long list of emergencies he's helped provide communications for, more often than not driving to the site in his pickup.
On a recent afternoon, it crackled with activity as Dunn, whose call sign is K7YD, communicated with friends using voice and rapid-fire Morse code, tapped out at a blinding pace on a semi-automatic Morse key set — the descendant of the old telegraph set of the 1800s.
During the Montana fires of 1988, he drove to Cooke City and helped relay messages.
He did the same for the floods in the Bitterroot Valley in 2000.
Then, from his home he helped manage emergency communications for Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
More recently, during floods that hit Roundup last June and the freakish winter fires on the Blackfoot Reservation last month, Dunn helped relay emergency communications, again from his home.
"They didn't have any com," he said, using amateur radio lingo, of the Blackfoot fires.
And he doesn't just assist with natural disasters — one time he even helped medical personnel track down a kidney donor.
But Dunn's ham radio hobby is not all seriousness. He enjoys chatting with friends around the world — and sometimes out of this world, like astronauts on the International Space Station.
Most of them are ham radio operators themselves, he said.
"They're lonely, shoot," he laughed.
Dunn uses computers tied to his radios to track the space station, which he can communicate with only when it's in a certain position overhead.
"Yeah! It's a lot of fun," he said.
While the age of the Internet has somewhat reduced the number of ham radio operators, it has also had a benefit — greatly improved technology, including those computers Dunn uses to track the space station, and satellites.
Dunn said he and hams around the world use 56 satellites rotating the earth to transmit voice, data and Morse code.
But not everything has to be high-tech to rock around the world. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, you hardly even need an antenna.
"I've worked Hawaii on a bedspring," Dunn said.
And he meant, literally, a bed spring. One of his buddies even used a stove pipe as an antenna to talk to Russia.
Dunn's favorite part of his hobby is using Morse code.
"Morse was the original communications mode," said Dunn, who is a federally licensed radio telegraph operator.
As he listened to a cacophony of jumbled simultaneous Morse coming over his radio, he was able to pick out that it was, in fact four different hams sending out the signals.
"There's a Japanese station right there," he said of one of the operators, hearing the prefix "J'' on the call sign that identified the ham as being from Japan.
"I enjoy the fellowship of the hobby," he said of being a ham radio operator. "I've got friends all over the world and friends I haven't even made yet."
He added, "It's a hobby of incredible scope."
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Information from: Livingston Enterprise, livingstonenterprise.com">http://www.livingstonenterprise.com
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