Culver City Amateur Radio Emergency Services will host Culver City’s Field Day at Fire Station 1, located at 9600 Culver Blvd. in the back parking lot on June 28-29. Visitors are welcome from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, June 28 and on Sunday, June 29, from 9 to 11:00 a.m. (Even though the event runs for a full 24 hours, the Fire Department gates must be closed after 9 p.m.)
The fastest way for a crisis to turn into a total disaster is to lose communications. From the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to tornadoes in Missouri, ham radio provided the most reliable communication networks in the first critical hours of the events. Because ham radios are not dependent on the Internet, cell towers or other infrastructure, they work when nothing else is available.
“We need nothing between us but air,” Allen Pitts of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) said.
The one consistent service that has never failed has been Amateur Radio. Culver City’s ham radio operators, “hams,” work in conjunction with the Culver City Fire Department to ensure that there will never be a communications blackout in Culver City.
On the weekend of June 28-29, the public will have a chance to meet and talk with Culver City’s hams and see what the Amateur Radio Service is about. Hams across the USA will be hosting public demonstrations of emergency communications abilities. This annual event, called “Field Day” is the climax of the week long “Amateur Radio Week” sponsored by the ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio. Using only emergency power supplies, ham operators will construct emergency stations in parks, shopping malls, schools and backyards around the country.
Visitors will have the opportunity to get on the air – to use ham radios to make contacts around the country. Stop by and see how they’re making Culver City a safer place!
Amateur Radio is growing in the US. There are now more than 700,000 Amateur Radio licensees in the US, and more than 2.5 million around the world. Through the ARRL’s Amateur Radio Emergency Services program, ham volunteers provide both emergency communications for thousands of state and local emergency response agencies and non-emergency community services too, all for free.
