The Philip B. Petersen Collection Broadcast October 22, 1988

Amateur Public Service

     The world of amateur radio.  This is Phil Petersen.  My call is W2DME and I live in Middletown, New Jersey.

     In amateur radio, all amateurs are expected to perform a public service.  It's a voluntary service with different facets and some of them take more to certain facets of this type of public service.  Some of them are daily transmitting messages across the country all over the United States.  You know, some radio amateurs will take a message from you on a small form you fill it out.  They will be glad to transmit it on to anybody in the United States and parts of the free world too, so long as there is a treaty between countries that will allow us to do it.  Certainly all around the United States and that's part of the National Traffic System.  They meet daily morning and evening and sometimes some of them in the afternoon.
     Another group that takes part in drills is part of emergency communications backup headquartered in Monmouth County by the Office of Emergency Management in Freehold, New Jersey.  All the little towns around the county have what we call RACES members.  RACES stands for Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service.  I am very active in that one in the Middletown Township area.  There's other groups working with the Red Cross with their communications.  The amateur radio service headquartered at the ARRL American Radio Relay League, they also participate in working with the Salvation Army in communications here on their food program.  In fall you'll hear about that program where they have a can-a-thon in handling messages and traffic from supermarkets to the headquarters of the Salvation Army in Asbury Park and Red Bank and transmitting information back and forth from there on up into the New Jersey headquarters in Newark.
     These traffic messages are also handled with our GIs overseas and in Europe and in other parts of the world.  I can remember listening to a lot of traffic coming in from Viet Nam during the war.  It was a morale call for people, what we call phone patched in.  They get in touch with a radio amateur in the United States and then the radio amateur would call up the GI's parents, mother or somebody and get them on the phone and reverse the charges.  They'd get these calls.  Here and there, some of the calls were turned down because the mother or the father didn't know that it was a radio amateur out there sending this message in.  He couldn't afford to do this all on his own pocket money.  Wherever these calls were accepted here was a big morale booster to the GIs overseas and certainly they were glad to hear from the parents.  These calls were free except for the last few miles of its travel coming in from the other side of the world.
     If you want to know more about this subject, our national organization and international organization as well is the American Radio Relay League.  They are the largest amateur radio organization in the United States and, for that matter, the world.  They're headquartered in Newington, Connecticut.  They would be very glad to send you some information on the subject of amateur radio and you can write to them at the American Radio Relay League, or just put ARRL, and the address is 225 Main Street, Newington, Connecticut 06111.

October 22, 1988

** Broadcasts recordings preserved and presented here by Mr. Robert Buss and Mr. Bernie Ricciardi, Phil's friends and fellow Marconi Chapter 138 QCWA members **

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