Here are some photos of the some of the crew enjoying their time at Winter Field Day.

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With 2020 ARRL Field Day – one of the biggest events on the Amateur Radio calendar – just about 12 weeks away, ARRL officials are monitoring this situation with the coronavirus very closely and paying close attention to all of the information and guidance being offered by the CDC’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html). 

At its core, Field Day is a local event and an opportunity for local amateur radio clubs to showcase the skills, science and technologies that make radio communication such a wonderful hobby and a valuable public service. Since the impact of the coronavirus outbreak has been very different in different parts of the country, we recommend that all amateur radio clubs participating in Field Day be in regular contact with their local or state public health officials for their advice and guidance on hosting Field Day activities. This also offers an opportunity for amateur radio clubs to bolster or re-establish their relationships with local and state public health and emergency management officials. 

Because of the unique circumstances presented this year, this can be an opportunity for you, your club and/or group to try something new.  Field Day isn’t about doing things the same way year after year – use this year to develop and employ a new approach that is in line with our current circumstances.

Local club officials are the most appropriate people to be making decisions about their specific Field Day programs. We are all concerned about protecting the health and safety of those participating in or attending Field Day activities, and so we trust local club officials to take the appropriate steps to monitor local conditions and make decisions in the best interest of their communities.

ARRL officials strongly believe that following the guidelines of local, state and national health care professionals will help ensure everyone’s safety in the coming weeks and months.

TEMPORARY RULE CHANGES

1) For Field Day 2020 only, Class D stations may work all other Field Day stations, including other Class D stations, for points.

     Field Day rule 4.6 defines Class D stations as “Home stations,” including stations operating from permanent or licensed station locations using commercial power. Class D stations ordinarily may only count contacts made with Class A, B, C, E, and F Field Day stations, but the temporary rule waiver for 2020 allows Class D stations to count contacts with other Class D stations for QSO credit.

     2) In addition, for 2020 only, an aggregate club score will be published, which will be the sum of all individual entries indicating a specific club (similar to the aggregate score totals used in ARRL affiliated club competitions).

     Ordinarily, club names are only published in the results for Class A and Class F entries, but the temporary rule waiver for 2020 allows participants from any Classto optionally include a single club name with their submitted results following Field Day.

     For example, if Podunk Hollow Radio Club members Becky, W1BXY, and Hiram, W1AW, both participate in 2020 Field Day — Hiram from his Class D home station, and Becky from her Class C mobile station — both can include the radio club’s name when reporting their individual results. The published results listing will include individual scores for Hiram and Becky, plus a combined score for all entries identified as Podunk Hollow Radio Club.

The temporary rule waivers were adopted by the PSC on May 27, 2020.

ARRL Field Day is one of the biggest events on the amateur radio calendar, with over 36,000 participants in 2019, including entries from 3,113 radio clubs and emergency operations centers. In most years, Field Day is also the largest annual demonstration of ham radio, because many radio clubs organize their participation in public places such as parks and schools.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many radio clubs have made decisions to cancel their group participation in ARRL Field Day this year due to public health recommendations and/or requirements, or to significantly modify their participation for safe social distancing practices. The temporary rule waivers allow greater flexibility in recognizing the value of individual and club participation regardless of entry class.

ARRL is contacting logging program developers about the temporary rule waivers so developers can release updated versions of their software prior to Field Day weekend. Participants are reminded that the preferred method of submitting entries after Field Day is via the web applet. The ARRL Field Day rules include instructions for submitting entries after the event. Entries must be submitted or postmarked by Tuesday, July 28, 2020.

The ARRL Field Day web page includes a series of articles with ideas and advice for adapting participation this year.

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For more information about amateur radio and field day events in Sugarpine, visit  http://tcares.net/ 

Roots of amateur radio date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than a hundred years ago, and locals here in the Mother Lode, up and down California, and all over the rest of the planet are still doing it. 

They call themselves hams and ham radio operators and amateur radio operators, and they are in downtown Sonora and up in Mi-Wuk and Sugarpine and over in Calaveras County, too. They don’t just listen to radio, they use radio to talk back and communicate with each other and the rest of the world. 

Amateur radio operators have also helped out during disasters and emergencies like the 2013 Rim Fire and the 2018 Donnell Fire. Radio communications technology has improved in recent decades, so local law enforcement and fire agencies do not rely on amateur radio operators as much as they used to. But they are still able to play key roles during disasters, Liz Peterson, coordinator for the Tuolumne County office of emergency services, said Tuesday in a phone interview. 

How it works

Most of us think of radio and we picture the knobs we turn on the dashboards in our cars, to listen to music and news and talk. The radios we go buy in the store are really just radio receivers. 

Amateur radio people use radio transmitters, combined with receivers, which they call transceivers, said Ned Sudduth, 49, a resident of Phoenix Lake whose radio call sign in N4NED. 

The planet, our solar system, and the rest of the universe are populated by electromagnetic waves and radio spectrums that existed in time before humans came to be here on Earth. The waves and spectrums have to do with radiation that comes from the sun and other stars. 

Historians say it was more than 115 years ago in December 1901 when a radio pioneer named George Marconi used radio waves to receive the very first known wireless trans-Atlantic Morse code transmission, sent from south Cornwall in England to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. 

Federal licensing of radio waves, radio stations, radio communications, and amateur radio operators started in 1912 with an act of Congress, called the Radio Act of 1912, Sudduth said. 

These days the Tuolumne County Amateur Radio & Electronics Society, who call themselves TCARES, have 100 members and there are more than 400 licensed hams in the county, Sudduth said. 

Hearing people in outer space

“We can listen to astronauts in space with our antennas,” Sudduth said. “It takes them 10 minutes to pass over California. I’m authorized to speak to them but I don’t because they’re usually speaking to school children in the Bay Area as they go over us. I can usually hear them 10 times a year. When I hear them they are closer to us than we are to Disneyland.” 

In other words, Sudduth said, it’s about 350 miles to drive to Disneyland in Anaheim, and the international space station is in an orbit about 250 miles above the earth’s surface. 

In emergencies, local amateur radio operators can serve as a backup communications network, Sudduth said. In places where radio reception is weak or poor, they have reception, and when existing radio networks are overloaded they can step in and help, in part because they have access to five radio repeaters that cover most of the county and the high country. 

During the Donnell Fire last summer, when the fire broke out, the American Red Cross set up an evacuation shelter in Sonora, and the American Red Cross in Sacramento asked Tuolumne County Amateur Radio & Electronics Society members to set up a communications station at the Red Cross shelter in Sonora, at the Discover Life Seventh-day Adventist Church near Woods Creek. 

Sudduth said they set it up so people could send emails over ham radio air without the internet. 

Helping out

Some TCARES members helped out during the Rim fire in 2013 in the back country where there was no cell service, Sudduth said. They were able to relay information, updates and requests for supplies. 

Peterson said Tuesday she went to speak to TCARES people on Saturday at one of the group’s monthly meetings. 

“They can help us with a variety of communications needs during disasters,” Peterson said. “There’s a subset of TCARES called RACES,” for the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service. “They’ve been around since the 1950s and they’re licensed with the FCC. They can provide additional or redundant radio services in an emergency.” 

County communications and technology have improved but the TCARES and RACES people can still help county authorities reach a lot of people, Peterson said. 

“We generally have coverage around the county,” Peterson said. “But they can still help us when AT&T lines go down for example, they can stage at schools in case somebody needs an ambulance. We used them during the Rim Fire and as PIOs and manning public information phone lines.” 

Event is planned and everyone’s invited

Members of the Tuolumne County Amateur Radio & Electronics Society plan to take part in a two-day national amateur radio exercise, June 22 and June 23 at Mi-Wuk Sugar Pine Fire Station, 24247 Highway 108, said Larry Crabtree, president of TCARES and the former chief for Mi-Wuk Sugar Pine Fire Protection District. 

Ham radio operators across North America have been doing public locations to showcase amateur radio since the 1930s. The two-day event in Sugarpine is open to the public and everyone is invited. 

Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of radio waves for non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communication. 

The term amateur is used to specify a person interested in radio communications with purely personal aims and without monetary interests, to differentiate amateur radio from commercial broadcasting, public safety, or professional two-way radio services such as naval radio, air traffic control, and taxi dispatchers, for example. 

For more than 100 years, amateur radio — also called ham radio — has allowed people from all 

More than 35,000 people from thousands of locations participated in field day 2018 activities nationwide, according to Crabtree. 

Ham radio functions independent of the internet and cell phone infrastructure, it can interface with tablets or smartphones, and it can be set up almost anywhere in minutes, according to David Isgur, communications manager for the American Radio Relay League, a national association. That’s the beauty of amateur radio during a communications outage. 

“Hams can literally throw a wire in a tree for an antenna, connect it to a battery-powered transmitter, and communicate halfway around the world,” Isgur added. “Hams do this by using a layer of earth’s atmosphere as a sort of mirror for radio waves. In today’s electronic do-it-yourself environment, ham radio remains one of the best ways for people to learn about electronics, physics, meteorology, and numerous other scientific disciplines.” 

Anyone can become a licensed amateur radio operator, Crabtree said. There are more than 725,000 licensed hams in the United States, as young as 9 years old and as old as 100.

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Field Day is an annual amateur radio exercise, widely sponsored by IARU regions and member organizations, encouraging emergency communicationspreparedness^[1] among amateur radio operators. In the United States, it is typically the largest single emergency preparedness exercise in the country, with over 30,000 operators participating each year. Field Day is always the fourth full weekend of June, beginning at 18:00 UTC Saturday and running through 20:59 UTC Sunday.

Since the first ARRL Field Day in 1933, radio amateurs throughout North America have practiced the rapid deployment of radio communications equipment in environments ranging from operations under tents in remote areas to operations inside Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs). Operations using emergency and alternative power sources are highly encouraged, since electricity and other public infrastructures are often among the first to fail during a natural disaster or severe weather. 

To determine the effectiveness of the exercise and of each participant’s operations, there is an integrated competitive component, and many clubs also engage in concurrent leisure activities (e.g., camping, cookouts). Operations typically last a continuous twenty-four hours, requiring scheduled relief operators to keep stations on the air. Additional contest points are awarded for experimenting with unusual modes, making contacts via satellite, and involving youth in the activity.

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2018 Field Day

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