Local radio enthusiasts tune in to Clark County Amateur Radio Club

It’s hard to miss the Yassons’ house — just look for the tall radio mast coming out of the roof, with long, thin aerials extending like bare tree branches. Philip Yasson didn’t say just how tall it was, but he said it was tall enough to worry his neighbor.

“He says, ‘Aren’t you worried about it falling over?’ ” Philip Yasson said. “And I said, ‘No, not really … because I have it designed so if it falls over, it’s going to fall on your house.’ ”

Philip and his wife, Barbara, ages 81 and 70, are among the 350 members of the Clark County Amateur Radio Club, a local group that has been committed to keeping the practice of amateur radio — also called “ham radio” — alive since the 1930s. Amateur radio involves using radio waves to communicate with other operators, noncommercially, whether they be in the next town over or halfway around the world.

“Amateur radio is not a broadcast,” said Barbara Yasson, also the CCARC’s secretary. “It’s a conversation between two people over the air.”

Barbara Yasson looked over at the amateur radio station she shared with her husband, then issued a warning: “If you’re an absolute neat freak, then this is totally scary.”

Over two desks, the Yassons had an assortment of transceivers — devices so named because they function both as transmitters and receivers. There were also shelves full of binders, containing notes and records of the Yassons’ past communications, some with operators as far away as Japan and South Africa.

But on this day, Barbara Yasson was worried about having difficulty connecting with fellow amateur radio operator Wayne Schuler. She’d had “mixed results” in trying to contact Schuler the previous day, even though Schuler lives just miles away in Cascade Park; fortunately, this time around their conversation went off without a hitch.

“Always nice to make a connection from Salmon Creek with Cascade Park,” she said.

The Yassons got involved in amateur radio back in 1995. Barbara’s father had been introduced to the hobby by some friends, and when he died, the Yassons inherited his radio equipment.

“We took the exam with the local club,” Barbara Yasson said. “It’s been a lot of fun ever since.”

Schuler, 78, has been an operator for even longer, deciding to get licensed back in 1957 after reading a magazine article on amateur radio.

“I wanted to hear police calls on the radio,” he said. “It’s kind of neat to talk to people across town and across the world, but I never did listen to police calls.”

Rules, regulations and relays

Amateur radio is more complicated than just turning on the receiver and waiting to pick up a signal. As with broadcast radio, messages are transmitted over a specific radio frequency and can only be received by operators who are tuned into the same frequency. And that’s to say nothing of the rules and regulations that the Federal Communications Commission imposes on amateur radio.

“We’re licensed by the FCC, so we have to have a certain amount of competence and understanding about radio and rules,” said Tim Kuhlman, the CCARC’s president. “Then, with those privileges of the license, we’re allowed to work on different radio bands and use a lot more power than, say, a lot of the other services.”

For example, citizens band radio — “what the truckers use, that’s completely unlicensed,” Kuhlman said — operates almost entirely on the frequency of 27 megahertz, and must limit its output power to less than five watts. Amateur radio users, in comparison, have access to a much wider range of frequencies and can power their signals up with as much as 1,500 watts, which makes them “more likely to cause interference,” Kuhlman cautioned.

To this end, the FCC provides operators with licenses. There are three main classes of license — Technician, General and Amateur Extra — each of which offers a greater range of bandwidth and more power to transmit messages. Higher power output allows operators to send messages further; in order to reach countries on the other side of the world, operators may have to bounce their signals off of passing satellites, or even the moon.

That wasn’t an option in the early 1900s, when amateur radio was still in its early stages.

“In the beginning, the signal didn’t go very far, and they used relay stations to get from the East Coast to the West Coast to send messages, which is how the ARRL — American Radio Relay League — got its name,” Barbara Yasson said.

The ARRL, which was founded in 1914, set up a system of repeaters across the country in order to help carry messages greater distances than they normally could and expand the range of communications. Today, the ARRL represents the interests of the national amateur radio community to the Federal Communications Commission.

‘Discoveries and experiments’

Schuler’s interest in eavesdropping on the police scanner ties in with another important function of amateur radio. In emergencies, when the internet and cellphone service fails, amateur radio operators can help with disaster relief efforts, as they’ve done with recent hurricanes in Puerto Rico and North Carolina.

“We can help out during disasters when all primary communication fails,” Kuhlman said. “Our club was involved, I believe, when Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980.

“They’re what I call ‘last responders.’ They’re the folks that you call when all communication fails, because they have all their own equipment,” he added.

It’s more often that amateur radio operators use their skills for community outreach and public engagement. Kuhlman said that local operators have helped out with Walk & Knock as well as the Veterans Day Parade. In 2016, the ARRL teamed up with the National Park Service, celebrating the latter’s centennial with an event called National Parks on the Air. Barbara Yasson participated with her husband, setting up a station at the Fort Vancouver National Site.

“The idea was that the hams would go out to different national parks and, as we call them, put them on the air,” she said. “This was a huge operating event, and it turned out to be really successful; a lot of people got into it and a lot of people had a lot of fun with it.”

National Parks on the Air was as much about publicizing the parks as it was about publicizing the amateur radio community. In addition to allowing hams to meet other hams, it helped them get the word out about amateur radio to the public. As of Oct. 3, there were 821,555 amateur radio operators in the United States, an increase of more than 3,500 over the last five months.

Several times a year, the CCARC organizes a series of free license classes for people who are interested in learning about amateur radio. Some of the classes are open to everyone, but the club also hosts some “YL Only” classes specifically for women. (Operators often refer to female operators as YL, for “young lady,” regardless of age; similarly, male operators are called OM, or “old man.”) “There are some women that would not get into the hobby if they didn’t have a class that goes into the detail that we do,” said Barbara Yasson, who helps teach the class. “If they have a question, we’ll beat at it until it gets answered.”

Kuhlman said that the many uses of amateur radio, whether for emergency purposes or personal experimentation, made it worth preserving and passing on to future operators.

“You can create a radio beacon and then other people tell you how far away that they hear that beacon based on different conditions and different frequencies. We can use radio to discover how our atmosphere works and how different things going through our atmosphere, like meteors … can cause an effect on radio propagation,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that do discoveries and experiments, and they couldn’t do that unless those radio bands were available.”