Two years ago, Mike Bartmon found himself in lower Manhattan armed with a cell phone, a wireless e-mail device and a handheld transceiver radio. The 58-year-old Staten Island resident was on his way to the Gateway Plaza apartments, a residential complex within New York City's Battery Park City neighborhood. He wasn't alone. With him were a nurse, a mental health specialist and several other Red Cross volunteers, all wearing white dust masks, hard hats and chemical-resistant coveralls. A week earlier, their lives had been turned upside down by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Now they were working alongside the wreckage of Ground Zero, ready to offer assistance to the people who'd lived closest to the World Trade Center.

"The one building of the complex that faced the Trade Center had all of its front windows blasted out," Bartmon said. Gateway Plaza's residents were being allowed 15 minutes to return to their apartments in small groups, gather belongings and cart them away.

Not long after Bartmon's team arrived at Gateway Plaza, the team's nurse approached him with a message. One of the residents, a diabetic, needed a prescription refilled but couldn't reach her doctor. Bartmon pulled his handheld radio out of its holster and hailed the Red Cross's network controller, a fellow amateur radio operator stationed at Red Cross headquarters across the East River in Brooklyn. As Bartmon relayed the nurse's request for a doctor, the radio transmitted his voice to a repeater antenna mounted atop Manhattan's Chrysler Building. The Red Cross's net controller tuned to the same radio frequency to retrieve Bartmon's message. Several minutes later, Bartmon's radio came to whirring and whistling life. The net controller informed him that the Red Cross was dispatching a doctor down to Battery Park City to help the diabetic woman.

As the Red Cross team handed out hotel vouchers to Gateway Plaza residents and provided trauma counseling and other medical attention, Bartmon served as the team’s only link with the world outside Ground Zero. To get to Gateway Plaza's boxy brick high-rise buildings, Bartmon's outreach team had walked past hundreds of tired, dust and debris-covered firefighters, police and emergency workers. More than a week had passed since the terrorist attacks, but the air was still filled with an acrid, burning smell.

For most of the city, cell and regular phone services were back to normal. Near Ground Zero, however, it was another story. "Cell phone service was, as expected, extremely unreliable and became my last resort even though I was instructed that the priority of communication would be the Blackberry (e-mail device), cell phone and HT (handheld radio)," Bartmon said. Blackberry pagers are made by a company called Research In Motion Ltd. They're like having a personal computer shrunk down to handheld size. Nifty little devices, but they rely on the same temperamental communications infrastructure as cell phones. And the network the Red Cross used to support the pagers wasn't properly configured at first, causing messages between the outreach team and Red Cross headquarters to be delayed by as long as an hour. Bartmon kept his handheld radio close at all times.

Although he didn't realize it at the time, Bartmon had spent years preparing for 9/11. His journey to Ground Zero began with a primitive crystal radio his father had given him as a boy living in Glen Oaks, Queens. In 1977 Bartmon got his amateur radio operator's license. Years later, he took an interest in the public-service aspects of amateur radio, joining volunteer organizations that assist local police and firefighters in times of trouble. Now, as part of the only Red Cross outreach team to enter Ground Zero, he was the eyes and ears of Red Cross headquarters, using his handheld radio to keep them informed of the team's progress. Most of the messages Bartmon relayed during his three days in Battery Park City were to keep Red Cross headquarters aware of his team's whereabouts. "We were delayed at one point, so I had to tell our bus to wait," he said. "You don't want to leave someone you're helping just because you've got to get back to the bus."

Despite his training as a radio operator working other emergencies, Bartmon soon found that 9/11 was a crisis unlike any other. Heading back home after his second day in Battery Park City, he stopped at an Italian restaurant to pick up dinner for him and his wife, Susan. "I was still wearing my Red Cross vest but didn't realize it," he said. "I went to pay for the food, but the guy at the restaurant said, 'No.' I almost cried. That's when I realized just how much stress it was." It would be a week after his trips to Ground Zero before he could pull himself back together. "I was there breathing the smoke and dust, and realizing I'm probably breathing in people I know,” he said. Indeed, Bartmon, a thoughtful, soft-spoken computer programmer, lost a neighbor and a cousin on 9/11.

On Bartmon's last day at Gateway Plaza, he was coordinating his team's departure to their bus when he spotted a resident in need of help. She was pushing a shopping cart and an office chair. "This is my business," she told Bartmon, who noticed her computer resting on the chair's cushion. "I've got to get it out of here so I can earn a living." Bartmon quickly got on his radio to arrange transportation for her. But it was the end of the day, and he couldn't find any. Next, he radioed headquarters to tell them he and two other volunteers wouldn't make the bus. They chose instead to walk the woman out of the Ground Zero area, where she met up with a construction worker who loaded up her belongings and took her uptown. Bartmon and the others, still clad in their white Hazmat suits and hardhats, took the subway home.

Only after his tour at Ground Zero did Bartmon find out that the Red Cross's initial plan was to send its outreach teams to Battery Park with only cell phones. The decision to include amateur radio operators came after some Red Cross members expressed doubt about relying solely on Blackberries and cell phones, which had failed in the hours following the attacks a week earlier. Ultimately, the Red Cross decided it couldn't risk losing contact with its volunteers at Ground Zero and assigned Bartmon and other radio operators to each team.

The Red Cross's reliance on amateur radio was a major victory for an amateur radio community that, despite its more than 100 years of history, has become increasingly marginalized by newer technologies. In New York City, the amateur radio community’s relations with paid first responders have been strained over the years. Police and firefighters have their own radios, after all. The Red Cross, however, which operates outside the city's budget, sees things differently.

Because the Red Cross's role is to provide food, shelter and clothing for disaster victims, it picks up where first responders such as the police, firefighters and emergency service workers leave off. "I don't think our relationship with amateur radio was valued to its full extent until after September 11," said Johanna Burke, acting assistant director of government relations for the American Red Cross of Greater New York. "As we found out on 9/11, the communication that we have come to rely on is more vulnerable than we thought it would be.”

Quiet Renaissance

Sept. 11, 2001, marked a quiet renaissance in the world of amateur radio, after years of declining membership and relative obscurity. Over the past couple of decades, amateur radio operators have witnessed their beloved pastime lose much of its luster. In the early part of the 20th century, hams, as amateur radio operators are also known, were a rogue band of technology buffs who were quick to pick up on Guglielmo Marconi's experiments with then-new wireless technology. They for the most part defied government regulation of the airwaves until World War I, when the U.S. Navy shut down all non-military radio operations.

Amateur radio reemerged afterward and became a valuable communication channel during World War II for America's allies and enemies alike. Hams, with their tube-filled, suitcase-sized radios, reached the height of their influence in the decades following World War II. A ham, bouncing his radio waves throughout the different layers of the earth's atmosphere, had access to a worldwide community that telephones and television couldn't yet deliver. Amateur radio's popularity continued to grow through Citizen Band, or CB, radio, which had its heyday in the 1970's. Highway-chase and trucker movies such as "Smokey and the Bandit," for example, used CB radio as a central plot device.

But amateur radio's cutting edge has been blunted in recent years by the emergence of the World Wide Web, increased use of cell phones and the growing popularity of video games. These new, more visual media have taken hold of today's younger generations, leaving amateur radio to look to many kids about as innovative as smoke signals. "You're a product of your childhood," said Mike Lisenco, a 50-year-old ham from Brooklyn who spent years of his childhood tuning in broadcasts on his short-wave radio. "My kids chat all the time on the Internet."

Lisenco, an actor whose heavyset frame and everyman looks have helped him land small TV and film roles, isn't ashamed to admit that his wife and children rib him about the time he spends in front of his radio. "People ask me, 'They still do that?'"

They do, although the amateur radio community has become less conspicuous over time. From the very beginning, hams have struggled against the stereotype of being geeky middle-aged recluses who would rather listen to the whistles, crackles and distant voices of a weeknight radio chat session than go to a party or a ballgame. But the more pressing issue hams face is the loss of the precious public radio spectrum that they use to communicate.

When a ham speaks into a microphone, the sound waves pass through the radio to a feed line, which is a piece of coaxial cable typically run through a wall or out a window to connect with an antenna. The antenna's job is to send and receive radio signals in the atmosphere. Radio signals are comprised of waves that can travel along the ground, up through the different layers of the earth's atmosphere or bounce between the atmosphere and the ground. These waves come in different lengths, travel at different speeds and are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, along with microwaves, X-rays and visible light.

Hams use waves of different wavelengths and frequencies depending upon the distance their message has to travel. High frequency (HF) waves are for long distance communications because they can be bounced between the ground and atmosphere. Very high frequency (VHF) and ultra high frequency (UHF) waves have shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies than HF waves. VHF and UHF waves don’t bend as easily has HF waves, so hams use VHF and UHF to communicate over short distances or bounce them off repeater antennas, which relay messages from point to point, to cover longer distances.

Mixed Signals

Despite the U.S. government's recognition of the amateur radio community as a cheap, ready-made communications infrastructure to supplement police, firefighters and emergency workers, amateur radio today is beset by more cultural, political and technological challenges than at any other point since 1912. The Radio Act of 1912 specified that amateur radio operators could not pass messages using wavelengths greater than 200 meters, except with special permission. This restriction was imposed so that government and businesses would have the freedom to use longer wavelengths without interference from radio hobbyists. The restriction was later amended to limit hams to wavelengths no longer than 160 meters.

The amateur radio community feels the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates U.S. broadcast media, is hurting its own ability to respond to emergencies such as 9/11 by continuing to sell portions of the radio spectrum to private businesses. This commercialization of public airwaves, many hams say, is made worse by interference from a wide range of relatively new gizmos – cordless phones, microwaves and wireless networks, to name a few – that interfere with radio signals.

Perceptions vary from region to region over just how valuable a service amateur radio operators provide. While some, such as the Red Cross, see the amateur radio community as an essential safety net guarding against the failure of more conventional forms of communication, others see hams as an untrained, unpredictable group of outsiders. In rural areas that still rely on volunteers for a variety of services, hams have long found acceptance. But in New York City, amateur radio operators have a history of hot and cold relations with the city's Office of Emergency Management, police and firefighters.

"A lot of people in uniform feel threatened by giving amateur radio operators access to emergency situations," said John Kiernan, coordinator of Manhattan's Amateur Radio Emergency Service, or ARES (pronounced air-ees). ARES's nationwide charter is to provide radio communications to public officials and rescue workers when other modes of communication fail. "They see us as amateurs looking to take their jobs, which we're not. The also see us a 'wannabes,' which we're not."

The debate over just how much amateur radio helps in times of emergency is nothing new. Just before WWI, the Atlantic Communication Co., an American subsidiary of the German Telefunken Co., built a high-powered radio station at Sayville, Long Island, in conjunction with a sister station in Nauen, Germany. The U.S. government in 1915 suspected the station was wirelessly broadcasting Morse code messages to the Germans about U.S. ship departures from the East Coast. Morse code is an international language of sound tones that are strung together to represent letters and numbers.

With limited knowledge of the new radio technology, the Secret Service at the time appealed to then Radio Commissioner Lawrence Krumm for help. Krumm, in turn, tapped the skills of New Jersey ham Charles Apgar, then 50, who was known for having developed a way to record wireless signals onto phonographic records. Apgar, an inventor who had dabbled in banking and spent time selling such diverse merchandise as cars and pianos, recorded transmissions from Sayville to Nauen each night. He then delivered the records to the Secret Service for analysis.

From these records the Secret Service learned that the station was sending information about Allied shipping to German U-boats. The U.S. government soon commandeered the station and its equipment and jailed the station's general manager and one of its engineers.

Just how much credit the government gave Apgar for his role is in dispute. Radio historian and author Clinton DeSoto wrote in his 1935 book "200 Meters & Down" that Apgar was commended for having provided "the most valuable service ever rendered by a radio operator to this country." Still, other historians write that the government later downplayed Apgar’s role in the investigation because the Secret Service didn't want to publicize the fact that it relied on a civilian for help.

Either way, Hiram Percy Maxim, founder of the American Radio Relay League, used Apgar's success in 1915 to offer the use of his budding organization's amateur radio network to the Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, a move that served as a precursor to the volunteer relationship that hams have today with first responders.

In 1996 former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani set up the city’s Office of Emergency Management as an independent agency to manage city crises. A few years later, amateur radio operators with the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, or RACES, (pronounced ray-sees), were successful getting OEM to allocate some space at its World Trade Center headquarters for hams and their equipment.

Ironically, Giuliani's expensive, sophisticated OEM facilities were destroyed on 9/11 and have since relocated to Brooklyn. An OEM spokesman said that, at this point, the office has no plans to re-allocate space to RACES, an amateur radio organization that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) started in the 1950s to provide backup communication services for local and state officials. New York City's OEM won't say anything further about its relationship with the amateur radio community.

Charles Hargrove, a 44-year-old Staten Island ham, played an instrumental role in getting the OEM to finally accept RACES and is still hopeful that he and other hams can continue their relationship. "We're trying to show them we have a skill set that the uniformed officers don't have," said Hargrove, the emergency coordinator for New York City ARES and a radio officer for RACES. During the week, Hargrove is the manager of a Manhattan lighting company. But he's a fulltime advocate of ham radio. "Neither the city nor OEM has the communication infrastructure, skills and equipment that RACES does."

Other hams have been around long enough to wonder if the situation will ever change. “The city always acted like they didn’t need anybody,” said Bill Butler, a 65-year-old Staten Island ham and retired Metropolitan Transit Authority signalman. Butler, who first learned about ham radio as a 12-year-old reading his brother's Boy Scout manual, said, “It's an arrogance."

Other hams acknowledge that the OEM's problems go far beyond its relationships with amateur radio. "OEM is in a state of flux," said Adam Fine, 35, coordinator of Brooklyn’s ARES chapter. "(New York) Police Commissioner (Raymond) Kelly is trying to take OEM power back, as is the city's fire department." Fine, whose ARES volunteers meet monthly across the street from one of Brooklyn's police stations, expressed frustration about the situation. "We haven't given up on OEM, but the police want nothing to do with us."

As New York’s amateur radio community works to improve its relationship with the city, hams nationwide wonder about their future. The number of licensed U.S. amateur radio operators has held steady for the past few years at about 680,000. But ARRL membership has shrunk from 177,000 in 1997 to 157,000 in 2002.

Membership in the ARRL, the main organizing body for amateur radio, is predominated by men in their late 40s and 50s. On one level the ARRL likes that. Middle-aged people have the patience and the means to tinker with the technology they were once entranced with as children. Of course, middle-aged people don't stay middle age forever, which creates stress on the ARRL to attract younger hams.

Rescue at Sea

Rather than tuning out, however, the industrious amateur radio community has tried to embrace new technologies, especially computers and the World Wide Web, with the hope of attracting teenagers to amateur radio. The availability of lighter, more mobile radios has also helped. Some handheld radios are the size of the smallest cell phones. The cost of radio equipment has also dropped from thousands of dollars for a tabletop unit the size of a large microwave oven to about $50 for a used handheld walkie-talkie.

"At the turn of the 19th century, the buzzword was wireless," said ARRL president Jim Haynie. "Today, the buzzword is still wireless."

As ARRL president, the 60-year-old Haynie is the foremost ambassador for U.S. amateur radio, carrying on the work begun by Hiram Percy Maxim almost a century ago. He's helped in more than his share of emergencies. Prior to 9/11, none of these was direr than an ocean rescue that he helped coordinate on March 28, 2000.

That day, Dutch teenager Willem van Tuijl had been shot when smugglers off the coast of Honduras attacked him and his parents. Van Tuijl, 13 at the time, had been at sea with his parents for five years, covering 40,000 miles of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, when they took their 44-foot sailboat along the Central American coast. There, a band of a group of men believed to be drug traffickers boarded the sailboat. Willem and his father, Jacco, had been out on an inflatable raft at the time. When they attempted to return to the sailboat to protect Willem's mother, Jannie, the attackers shot at their raft with an AK-47 rifle, hitting Willem in the abdomen.

The attackers fled after the shooting, leaving the Jannie and Jacco to care for their injured son, Haynie said. He tells the story, which he's done dozens of times already, in his calm southern drawl. That drawl is an asset, no doubt, when he needs to project an image of control and authority over the radio waves.

Experienced amateur radio operators, Jannie and Jacco turned to their marine-band radio for help. While Jannie held Willem and tried to control his bleeding, Jacco carefully scanned different frequencies until he came across the normal chatter of the Maritime Mobile Service Network. Amateur radio operators run the service for the very purpose of assisting boaters.

Once Jacco made contact, several hams coordinated a complicated rescue operation that involved the U.S. Coast Guard and Honduran Navy. Philadelphia-based ham Fred Moore, who speaks fluent Spanish, spoke with Jacco to get the location of his boat and pass that information along to the Hondurans. Another ham, Miami physician Dr. Jim Hirschman, provided first aid and medical advice to Willem's parents until help arrived. Twenty hours after the shooting, the Honduran Navy airlifted Willem and Jannie to a hospital in La Ceiba.

But the emergency was far from over. After Willem arrived at the Honduran hospital, doctors there soon realized they didn’t have the equipment to perform the necessary spinal cord surgery. Moving Willem to a U.S. hospital was difficult because several wouldn't take the teenager without promise of payment.

"When I heard this, I picked up the phone and called Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) to find out what we could do," Haynie said. Sessions, who is one of Haynie's local congressman, used his influence to get Willem admitted at Children's Medical Center of Dallas. Honduran amateur radio operators later took up a collection to cover the cost of Willem's treatment in their country.

Although Willem is paralyzed from the waist down, Haynie said the teen's doctors agreed that he wouldn't have survived without a coordinated evacuation first to La Ceiba and, later, to Children's Medical Center.

Homeland Insecurity

The emphasis on homeland security has also helped raise the profile of amateur radio in certain areas of the federal government. At a time of shrinking municipal budgets and pervasive fear of domestic terrorism, the services provided by amateur radio operators are as in demand now as any other time during amateur radio's long history. Amateur radio operators, according to FCC regulations, can't be paid for their time, yet their technical prowess and reliable communications equipment are present in most communities. In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in late June made the ARRL a part of its Citizen Corps program.

President George Bush set up the Citizen Corps in 2002 as part of his USA Freedom Corps policy, a move to encourage volunteerism at the local level and take some of the strain off municipal budgets. FEMA, now part of the Homeland Security Dept., said it also wants to expand its relationship with amateur radio as well as the role that amateur radio plays in local communities. "Amateur radio operators have proved themselves over and over again, that when everything is down, they can continue to communicate," said Liz DiGregorio, a 20-year veteran of FEMA who's also the Citizen Corps' liaison to the White House.

These government accolades haven't gone unnoticed among hams. "I think the amateur radio community has long known how effective we could be in a crisis," said Tim Lewallen, public information officer for the Nacogdoches Amateur Radio Club in Texas. "Unfortunately, events like the Oklahoma City (Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building) bombing, 9/11 and the shuttle Columbia explosion have given us the opportunity to show what we can do. The fortunate benefit to these unfortunate events is increased exposure, a grant for emergency communications training and interest from groups that previously didn't pay us much heed, like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security."

About 200 hams provided communications for Texas and Louisiana officials in February after the space shuttle Columbia explosion rained dangerous debris over those states. ARES operators from the Texas Nacogdoches Amateur Radio Club started a radio network just a few minutes after the initial explosion was heard.

In Nacogdoches, ARES is part of the city and county emergency operations unit. The group saw it's first action when the Stephen F. Austin University Geographic Information Systems lab contacted them to help coordinate the lab's efforts to begin cataloging debris sites. "As more and more state and federal agencies joined in the search and recovery effort it became apparent that they could not communicate with each other," Lewallen said. Each agency had its own radio systems that used different frequencies, which prevented them from communicating with each other, a situation similar to the one New York City police and firefighters encountered on 9/11. "Add to that the terrain and pine trees of East Texas which makes radio communication difficult, and the operation had the potential to be a logistical nightmare."

Instead, by working with amateur radio operators, the Nacogdoches county Emergency Operations Center had the ability to communicate at several frequencies and at higher power levels than they would on their own. Each search team had at least one amateur radio operator responsible for coordinating communications.

Poor Operators

In addition to the amateur radio community's willingness to help in times of emergency, hams are linked together by several other common threads, including their interest in radio technology itself and their fondness for technological experimentation. Still, the social and support aspects of the ham radio community are perhaps the strongest incentive for its members. On a Wednesday evening in late June, more than a dozen Brooklyn hams gathered for their monthly ARES meeting. Twice during the meeting, Brooklyn ARES coordinator Adam Fine called for a moment of silence to acknowledge what some of his operators were coping with in their personal lives.

Fine is an emotional guy. In addition to the volunteer work he did during 9/11, he's been back to Ground Zero for the past two memorial services. On the first memorial, he was touched by the thanks he received from people still mourning their loved ones. "That numbed me, brought tears to my eyes."

While one of Fine's hams was in the hospital fighting cancer, another ham named Mitch Cohen was caring for his an ailing wife. Fine presented Mitch, a 35-year-old ham from Coney Island, with a get-well card signed by most of the hams present as well as a bouquet of flowers. Mitch, a heavyset man with a day's stubble and a forearm tattoo of his name in a heart with an arrow through it, doesn't look like the type of person who wears his emotions on his large sleeves. Still his eyes started to tear up a bit as he thanked his fellow hams.

The origin of the nickname, ham, is subject to a variety of opinions and theories. The most straightforward explanation comes from post-Civil War Iowan Congressman and railroad mogul Grenville Mellen Dodge. In his 1899 book "The Telegraph Instructor," he defined a ham, or wireless radio user, as "a poor operator,” or someone trying to emulate the more successful operators transmitting across commercial landlines at the time. Others speculate that "ham" refers to the initials of an early amateur radio operator or was simply chosen because it was easy to transmit via Morse code.

"Or it could be that hams like to hear themselves talk," said Manhattan ARES coordinator Kiernan. On a rainy Saturday morning in August, Kiernan, a 60-year-old U.S. Postal Service manager, is ankle-deep in mud. He's at Manhattan's Riverside Park coordinating communications for the NYC Triathlon and ITU Ford NYC World Cup races. Kiernan wears an orange baseball cap over his steely gray flat top haircut. A big man, Kiernan's handheld radio looks like a toy when he raises it to his mouth. As a fifth-grader, Kiernan was introduced to amateur radio by a nun. "She got some kids interested in radio to help broaden their horizons. Kiernan said he doesn't remember if she herself was a ham, but he said it's common for clergy doing missionary work to know their way around a radio.

Kiernan takes his participation in ARES very seriously and says most hams are mindful of the rules established by the FCC governing amateur radio. Hams will either contact each other as they surf the airwaves, or they'll set up a scheduled meeting at a particular frequency. Amateur radio conversations are anything but private because the airwaves are open to everyone. The FCC doesn't permit hams to speak or transmit in code, lest they be accused of engaging in commerce over the amateur airwaves and have their licenses revoked. The FCC can issue warnings and fines, even revoke an operator's license, for transmitting outside the amateur spectrum of radio waves, using too much power (or wattage) when transmitting and interfering with other operators' transmissions, or conducting business over the amateur airwaves.

A lack of regulation led to the downfall of CB radio. CB still exists, but a lot of the more serious hams stay away from it. The FCC requires CB operators to have a license, although they don't need any training in the more technical aspects of radio or ham etiquette. Kiernan shakes his head when the topic of CB is raised. "I don't like the bad language they use on CB," he said. "They're not held to as high standards." CB has since been replaced in popularity by the Family Radio Service, a frequency that people can use to communicate over short distances without the need for a license.

When Kiernan had some time between triathlon races he talked about setting up his radio equipment at home. Apartment dwellers typically don't have the luxury of permanently mounting their own antennas, although Kiernan lives on the top floor of his Manhattan building and has used his location to mount antennas on the roof. Just how much equipment he can fill his two-floor apartment with depends on "how much I can sneak past the YL." Kiernan's shorthand refers to his wife, or the young lady, although he jokes that some hams refer to their wives as their "XYL," or ex-young lady.

Hargrove, one of New York's most active hams, has spent about $5,000 over the past decade on radios, tuners, three different antennas and assorted accessories. The cost can be very different, however, for hams that live outside the city and have big yards that can support tower antennas that start at $5,000. The higher an antenna can transmit a signal off the ground, the more expensive it is but the better the signal, Hargrove said. Westchester, N.Y., ham Alan Crosswell, who estimates that he's spent as much as $4,000 on all of his radio gear, said he won't buy an antenna. “Buying an antenna takes away from the fun of building one yourself," said Crosswell, 44, director of network and computing systems at Columbia University and a member of Westchester ARES and RACES.

Despite the help that hams provide in times of emergencies, "some people swear up and down that amateur radio is in a decline," Kiernan said. He attributes part of that mentality to the image that hams tend to portray. The reclusive ham, sitting down in his basement like some kind of mad scientist surrounded by dials and switches, isn't far from wrong. Some wonder whether amateur radio is like rubbing two sticks together, not for the purpose of starting a fire but rather because you know how to do it. Today, matches are certainly within reach. Under his mustache, Kiernan's mouth curves into a smile. While he acknowledges that in some regards the medium is more important than the message, "look at what happened on 9/11, when everything went down."

For events like the triathlon, where police are called upon to direct traffic and keep pedestrians from being trampled by the racers, hams are becoming increasingly welcome. While Kiernan was in the middle of the action, making himself available to race organizers who needed to know where their racers were, Hargrove sat in a police van nearby. Police in the van checked in with Hargrove every few minutes to find out when they could start opening up roads again.

"Police actually requested a ham in this vehicle," Hargrove said between transmissions to hams stationed along the race route. “Years ago, that wouldn’t have happened.” It's easy to detect a sense of pride in Hargrove's voice. "September 11 created a revival of amateur radio, especially in New York, where people have come to take the city's basic services for granted."

Searching for a Fountain of Youths

Many amateurs were introduced to ham radio by listening to short-wave radio transmissions from around the world. Shortwave is a form of long-distance, high frequency transmission that allows only licensed stations to broadcast their signals. Listeners don't need a license. Manhattan ham Wallace Ayres, 70, started listening to short-wave radio transmissions from the British Broadcasting Corp. and Radio Moscow as far back as the 1950s.

"There weren't a lot of cell phones when I got started," said Ayres, who volunteers his services at boat races, bike tours and emergency drills throughout the year. He keeps a bag filled with radios and related equipment right beside his cane.

While Sept. 11 gave hams new purpose and increased interest in the pastime, the amateur radio community had already gotten a huge helping hand in 1991, when the FCC decided it wasn't necessary to learn Morse code to get an operator's license.

The FCC's decision to drop Morse code as a requirement helped lower the average age of U.S. hams from about 60 years old to about 40. "Ham radio was dying before 1991," Hargrove said. "Literally, its people were dying." The FCC issues amateur radio licenses after hams successfully complete an exam that tests the ham’s knowledge of both radio technology and government regulation. Ayres, who worked for 35 years with the New York State Insurance Dept., had to master Morse code’s arcane language of dashes and dots to get his license in 1985. Still, he welcomes the loosening of licensing requirements. "The military doesn't even use Morse code anymore."

The age of the amateur radio population has been a real concern nationwide. "The amateur radio population is getting older," said Bob Fay, president of California's Sun City Amateur Radio Club. The Sun City club was established in 1948 with 50 members. Today, there are 20 members, with most of the losses due to radio operators passing away or growing too old to participate club activities. Likewise, at a July ARES barbecue held at Mike Bartmon's Staten Island home, he and other emergency coordinators talked about how they could recruit new people into amateur radio. It didn't take Bartmon long to notice that meeting consisted of a "room filled with middle-aged men."

The amateur radio community isn't exclusively the domain of the Baby Boom generation or of men, for that matter. Dara Weinerman, 24, has been a licensed ham since 1994. Her father, also a ham, tried to teach her Morse code at the age of six, before she could even read. Having grown up within the amateur radio community, Weinerman is well aware that there aren't a lot of women hams, although the Smith College graduate said she doesn't dwell on the reasons. "It's traditionally been a technical hobby, and not a lot of woman are interested in that."

Recruitment is tough because people's leisure time is much less than it was years ago, said ARRL president Haynie, a former steel salesman who got hooked on amateur radio while using it during long road trips. "And kids' time is so in demand, they never think about something like amateur radio." Hargrove agrees. "The next generation of kids is growing up with cell phones, the Internet and MP3 downloads, but they don't understand the infrastructure that makes all of that technology work," he said. "There's an expectation that people have that their technology will always be around, will always be available."

Bronx resident Chris Sierra, 34, has been a member of the New York City ARES since March and an amateur operator for about a year. He's one of the new operators who took an interest following 9/11. Sierra, a network administrator for the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan, has two sons who generally prefer the Internet's visuals to ham radio's crackly voices, whirs and whistles. Still, Sierra said three-year-old Mathew gets a thrill when Sierra lets him get on the microphone and put out calls to other stations. And seven-year-old Chris Jr. is slowly learning Morse code. Sierra said he hopes this interest will continue for a long time. "They're the future of radio."

Interference and Progress

In addition to recruiting new hams, another pressing issue on Haynie's agenda these days is the telecommunications industry’s new practice of delivering broadband networking service to homes and businesses over power lines. Such service uses overhead wires to conduct high frequency and very high frequency digital signals to computers. "If you put an open radio signal on a wire like that, it's going to radiate," Haynie said. "It will render the amateur bands useless because of interference." Amateur radio has its work cut out for it in this area, as the telecommunications industry, one of the hardest hit by the slow economy over the past three years, looks to squeeze additional revenue out of its existing infrastructure.

At a June hearing held by the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Haynie praised the House's proposed Spectrum Protection Act. "We always make do, but that concept has reached the breaking point for our service," he said. "We're just into a real hard spot here, and that's why I'm here today. We can't do much with high speed data networks anymore because our VHF/UHF spectrum, which we originally had exclusively, has literally become polluted with wireless activity."

But the FCC isn’t convinced. "The claim of the loss of frequencies isn't a particularly valid claim in many cases," said William Cross, a program analyst for the FCC. Hams didn’t have exclusive use of a lot of the spectrum they lost. And the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum devoted to cell phone use originally came from unused television channels, rather than from amateur radio. Regarding broadband over power lines, there have been concerns raised, but Cross doesn't yet know if they're valid. "Hams see that as potentially a big problem, but it's a problem to any user of the radio spectrum, which would include businesses and government agencies.”

In addition to their volunteer efforts at emergencies and sporting events, another way hams have tried to keep their pastime in the spotlight is through the development of new technologies. One major advancement in amateur radio technology has been digital signal processing, or the ability to use a computer to pull faint radio signals in from outer space. This makes it easier to tune in other operators in the way today's car stereos use digital displays rather than a dial to hone in on a particular station.

"It's hard to pick out some signals by ear," Hargrove said. "The computer does a better job." Digital signal processing also makes for more effective use of the bandwidth that amateurs have access to. The FCC likes this because it lets more hams fit on their allotted spectrum, which decreases the likelihood that they'll be lobbying the government for more bands, Hargrove said.

Amateur radio is also melding with the latest computerized technology through automatic packet/position reporting system (APRS) software. APRS works like the ham radio version of a global positioning system, where a mobile radio transmits a signal that can be picked up by a radio linked directly into a computer. General Motors' OnStar technology works similarly using a car owner's cell phone.

The computer-radio combination collects signals from a number of radios to create a location map of the different transmissions. This is particularly useful when hams volunteer to assist for races, such as the upcoming New York City Marathon. A ham on a bike can keep pace with the runners and provide the network controller with very specific information about the race’s progress.

Slow-scan television technology has been part of the amateur radio community for years, but the emergence of cheap digital cameras has made it more popular. Using a digital camera or camcorder, a ham can scan an image onto his computer and use the radio to transmit the image like an e-mail to another computer. All of this without the need to pay an Internet service provider.

Closure

Bartmon, who has worked as a freelance computer programmer, thinks the technological advances are nice, but radio’s real appeal to him will continue to be donning his orange ARES baseball cap in times of emergency and keeping an eye out for trouble. The evidence of amateur radio's importance will be evident at this fall's New York City Marathon, just as it is every year when as many as 300 hams take up positions along the route.

"The roles of the different operators are varied, and not many people outside the amateur community really know we're involved," Bartmon said. "But the runners know, if you get into trouble, look for someone wearing an orange hat."

Despite his interest in the public service aspects of amateur radio, Bartmon didn't join Hargrove, Fine, Kiernan and other hams at the ceremonies commemorating the second anniversary of 9/11. He says he's tried to move on. He's even contemplating a career change. He wants to become an English teacher. Like most New Yorkers, he doesn't need any ritual to remind him of 9/11. He got as close as any ham did in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center. "I don't need that," he said. "I've had my closure." Instead, he'll get his radios ready for the next time he's needed.