By any measure, the New York Marathon is a magnificent production. More than 50,000 runners who will start the race on Sunday, November 3 world’s largest marathon. Their route will take them through all five boroughs of the city, from the starting line in Staten Island to Brooklyn and Queens, over the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, north to the Bronx, and then down the east side of Central. Park to the finish line inside the park.

Keeping everything going without a hitch is an extraordinary organizational skill. The race relies on a small army of volunteers who do everything from staffing water stations at each mile marker to making sure runners don’t get lost. offer medical expertise.

But perhaps more than anything, coordinating an event with so many moving parts requires reliable and efficient communication. Volunteers play a critical role here too; There is also a very specific group: local ham radio (or “ham radio”) operators.

Donni Katzovicz is an amateur radio enthusiast who has been volunteering in Marathon since 2018. Event HamsA group that has been coordinating Marathon’s use of amateur radio spectrum for the past decade. He explains that amateur radio essentially plays two important roles during the marathon.

The first is the communication route that does not require the use of official channels. “Obviously,” he says, “Marathon has commercial (radio) licenses and (its own communications infrastructure). (Also) you have all the local emergency services: FDNY, NYPD, EMS. The National Guard steps in. The Secret Service steps in. And they all have (their own) radios and equipment.”

But, he continues, “New York City is a big place. And if, say, there’s a runner violating uniform policy or holding a very large inflatable donut, maybe the best use of resources for NYPD radio is to not engage in that.”

In addition to chasing people in overly extravagant costumes, amateur radio is also poised to play a second, more critical role: providing a reliable and durable backup communications method in case the main channels go down for any reason. “If there was a major failure of all the major, supercritical systems (organizers know) there is still a backup there,” Katzovicz says.

At its most basic level, amateur radio is any radio that operates on radio bands reserved for amateurs. As Katzovicz explains, enthusiasts are finding all kinds of uses for a small corner of the electromagnetic spectrum: “The hobby itself is really, really incredibly broad and encompasses many different parts of science and technology. Some people… use walkie-talkies and can talk to other licensees in their neighborhood; others build their own radios or their own Rube Goldberg-like devices to listen and transmit, and others coordinate with local civilian agencies and provide backup communications during planned and unplanned events.

Ham radio is well-suited to the latter role because, as Katzovicz explains, “It’s incredibly durable.” This is because radio is a fundamentally simple technology that hasn’t changed much in decades.

Essentially, all you need to communicate via radio is a transmitter and a receiver, both of which are devices enthusiasts can build themselves. For example, a simple radio simply encodes a message and broadcasts it on a specific frequency via the built-in antenna. Anyone within range can tune into the same frequency and receive this message. Let’s say in a scenario where a city’s entire power went out, battery-powered radios still worked just fine, but cell phones were useless.

( Relating to: The rich history of amateur radio culture )

What makes amateur radio so resilient to disruption is the lack of need for supporting infrastructure. Even other types of radio are more centralized in nature. For example, a large commercial radio station requires powerful, long-range transmission equipment. Since this type of equipment is expensive, multiple stations often share the use of a single transmitter. (At one point in the 1960s, all of New York City’s FM stations Same array on top of the Empire State Building.)

This is effective because it eliminates the need for each station to build its own transmitter, but it also provides a single point of failure: If one transmitter fails, all stations using it fail as well. (In practice, most stations today have redundant transmission arrangements, but even so commercial radio continues to rely on a relatively small number of transmitters compared to the number of stations using them.) More generally, it is an important point that there are a large number of transmitters conceivable. Scenarios where damage to vital central infrastructure could damage or completely disable communications capacity.

Unfortunately, New York has more first-hand experience of this than most cities. The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 dealt a serious blow to the city’s communications infrastructure; especially since the twin towers are home to many large mobile phone and television towers. The attacks also revealed flaws. Equipment used by first respondersThis situation was exacerbated by the fact that the critical repeater on which the equipment relied was located in one of the towers, as was the emergency management office itself.

“Ham radio operators and local volunteer groups have been helpful during this time,” says Katzovicz. And while 9/11 caused an incident a series of changes To provide a more resilient communications infrastructure, amateur radio The perfect tool for emergenciesIts role is summed up by a truism popular in amateur radio circles: “When the phones are off, the hams are on.” This fact was vividly revealed in recent natural disasters in the southern United States: small local radio stations and individual operators, proven to be vital providing emergency updates and an operator reports He said several colleagues were airlifted to affected areas to restore communications with isolated communities.

If all goes well, the ham aficionados volunteering at this year’s Marathon won’t have to do anything more strenuous than chasing oversized donuts. But if emergency backup services are needed for whatever reason, the city’s ham enthusiasts will be on hand to ensure the show goes on.

Ham enthusiasts who would like to volunteer their services should contact Event Hams.