Sluggin’ it out with an emergency radio afficionado

I should first mention that I am big into emergency applications of amateur radio. Firmly believing in ham radio’s ability to provide vital communication links “when all else fails”, I am using my activities in Emergency Medical Services at the county, and over the last years also at the state level, to plug this topic (which is not that popular in Germany) wherever I can.

So naturally I was looking for emergency radio applications when visiting the Ham Radio 2009 convention in Friedrichshafen. Little did I know that this quest would leave me quite upset and even physically assaulted …

Talk about near field radiation - magnetic loop among the mortals

We rapidly spotted a booth which announced in bold “Emergency and Disaster Communications”. Apparently they were especially demonstrating email handling via short wave radio. Part of the display was a magnetic loop antenna, about 2 m² in area, mounted at ground level and protruding into the alley between the booths. The loop was constructed from rectangular aluminum stock, bolted together at the corners with stainless steel screws, and fed rather sloppily with a secondary winding from insulated wire, placed inside using bungee cord. The ham radio friend and colleague I was traveling with, ever the inquisitive engineer, wanted to take a closer look at the construction (which was in no way cordoned off), inadvertently touched antenna – and immediately received a clearly visible RF burn on his finger. Talk about RF safety …

We discussed a bit what to do, and then decided that at least we should notify the good people at the booth of what had happened, so that they could maybe stop transmitting, or take some other safety measure. Clearly, when you allow the public to approach your antenna to within an infinitesimally small distance, all RF exposure rules would be violated, and Germans tend to be a bit extreme in their concerns about the potential effects of non-ionizing radiation. So nothing less than the reputation of ham radio as a reliable, self-policing service was at stake here.

We approached the person operating the radio (I hesitate to bestow the honorable term “ham radio operator” on him) and told him about the mishap. He immediately freaked out, telling us that we had no business touching his antenna, and to illustrate the severity of our crime, he grabbed my colleague by the arm, shook him violently and ripped my colleague’s shirt in the process. With his other arm, he smacked me in the chest. I tried to argue that maybe he was a bit out of line now, and besides that slightly touching an antenna was in a different league than physically attacking people, but naturally to no avail. So we walked away, and I was seriously considering filing a complaint with police.

Reconsidering, and remembering that ham radio should be self-policing, we approached the booth of DARC, the German national organization for amateur radio, the sponsor of the show. I should also mention that the booth made reference to one of DARC’s districts. After a while, we were allowed to address one of the club’s top ranking officers (who started the conversation saying that he had very little time to listen to us). He was in no way concerned about what had happened to us, and emphasized that DARC wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with “these people” – a bit later, I realized he did not mean people breaking RF exposure laws and smacking fellow hams, no, he meant people engaging in emergency radio activities.

Finally, I managed to convince the show’s professional management to attend to the issue, which I am sure they did. And no, we did not file a complaint with police. We had already lost close to an hour to this strange affair, and wanted to finally enjoy the show – which we thoroughly did, by the way.