FOLKS
BY STEVE HANF
riding the
waves (airwaves, that is)
D
ecades before he once used a handheld radio to communicate with astronauts aboard a space shuttle, Jim Bailey remembers sitting in his home in Petersburg, Virginia, trying to watch the new television set his family had just purchased. There was just one problem: The signal from the ham radio operator who lived across the street interfered with their TV. Maddening? Nah. Jim was intrigued – and a lifelong hobby was born. “I used to listen to our neighbor through the television every time he got on,” Jim recalls. “I could hear him talking to people all over the world, and I thought, ‘I’d really like to do that,’ so I got a shortwave radio as a Christmas present and did a lot of listening.” Growing up across the pond in England, Andrew Darling also watched in awe as his father dabbled in electronics. Inspired by this, Andrew built his first transistor radio from scratch when he was 13 or 14, and when he heard a couple of folks chatting over the air, he wanted to learn more – so he wrote one of them a letter despite knowing nothing more than a first name and a call sign. “All I wrote on the envelope was ‘Bruce, G3WMZ,’ but the post office in England at that time was the licensing authority, and two days later, Bruce called me on the phone,” Andrew says with a laugh. “It’s pretty extraordinary, but he didn’t live that far away, and we became really good friends. After that, I got a little bit more into the stuff and got licensed the earliest I could.”
Kitty Hawk resident Greg Akers, on the other hand, didn’t take up the hobby until moving to Corolla with his wife in 2013. “There’s realistically a time when we can be cut off up here,” he remembers telling her. “I’m going to study and get my ham license so we have another means of communication in case everything else fails on the Outer Banks.” Of course, getting his three operator licenses came with another perk: “My wife said, ‘Greg, this is just an excuse for you to buy more electronics,’” he remarks cheerfully. “And there’s a little bit of truth to that.” These tales are worth repeating because, well, that’s what these gentlemen do. All three hold leadership positions with the Outer Banks Repeater Association (OBRA), a collection of more than a hundred active members who enjoy spending time together on the airwaves, during club socials and at community events when they can lend a helping hand. As many folks may know, the Outer Banks holds a special place in radio history: Reginald Fessenden, who often gets lost in the shadow of Guglielmo Marconi, is credited with being the first person to transmit speech and (later) music by radio in the early 1900s – a feat he managed by utilizing signal towers in Buxton and Manteo. And the airwaves have been crackling up and down the coast ever since, thanks in large part in recent years to the Outer Banks Repeater Association. In layman’s terms, a repeater is a combination receiver and transmitter that can take a weaker
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4 6 | FA L L/H O L I DAY 2020
