DUBLIN -- When electricity, telephone lines and other forms of communication go down in emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina, the question becomes not only who are you going to call but how?

Often, both answers are the Amateur Radio Emergency Services, including the New River Amateur Radio Club.

Ten members of the club spent 12 hours Saturday conducting a field exercise at the New River Valley Fairgrounds. The exercise allowed them to field-test their radio equipment and antennas during sustained use.

Using portable generators, batteries or solar power, these "ham" radio operators from Pulaski and Montgomery counties showed how they or others among the some 670,000 amateur radio operators in the United States can step in and provide communications in an emergency.

"Katrina's a good example," Roger Bell, who has a planning and investment advisory business in Pulaski County, said Monday. He recalled how two amateur radio volunteers handled communications at a hospital with some 1,500 employees when it was evacuated because of the hurricane. "They were the last to leave," he said.

The amateur radio operators carry out such communications work at their own expense.

"We're volunteers. We're people who do this as a semi-pro hobby," Bell said.

In April, he said, New River volunteers stood ready to establish emergency communications during a fire near the border of Henry and Patrick counties that threatened to wipe out communication towers on top of a mountain. Fortunately, the fire turned back. Otherwise, the hams would have been providing all county emergency communications until the towers could be rebuilt.

The New River exercise was one of many across the country, coming at the end of Amateur Radio Week during which ham operators demonstrate communication modes including AM, sideband, FM, digital, code, satellite and high-frequency TV communications.

When everything goes, Bell said, ham radio operators can resort to the dot-dash signals of Morse code. That may be a long way from Internet capabilities that people take for granted today. But, he said, "you have to have ideal situations to operate computers."

Ham operators have provided emergency communications for the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Federal Emergency Management Agency and various state and local agencies.

"This is not your grandfather's radio anymore," Bell said. "It may be called 'amateur radio' because we are not compensated for our services, but that does not mean we're not prepared."

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