Amateur radio club plays important role during emergencies

Published 2:00 pm Sunday, July 20, 2025

EATONTON, Ga. – One of the top three amateur radio clubs in Georgia is the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club in Putnam County.

They are known over the airwaves as K4PAR.

The group now has several members and has plans of growing.

“We’d love to grow the club in numbers,” said Larry Gage, who lives in Greene County and serves as the emergency communications coordinator for Greene County. 

Gage has been a member of the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club since 2016.

“Radio communications and amateur radio has just gone through a phenomenal revolution,” Gage said recently. “Digital has found its way into amateur radio, and not only was it a phenomenal surge in membership but it gives us so many more capabilities than we’ve had in the past.”

From Norfolk, Virginia, to Galveston, Texas, there are antennas set up on the Georgia Fall Line.

“We’ve got fantastic coverage not only for single-side down CW Morse Code, but the new window at Gateways,” Gage said.

He was directly involved in helping provide emergency communications in two major weather related storms, hurricanes Michael and Helene.

Asked how helpful he and fellow members of the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club were during Hurricane Helene, Gage recalled it was a time when a ham amateur radio operator was involved at ground zero.

“When a hurricane hits shore, you just know that people have no power, no cellphone and no internet,” said Gage, who serves as the outreach director for the local amateur radio club.

He said he and other ham amateur radio operators pick up call signs from operators at ground zero after a hurricane hits.

“We don’t know what messages are being sent, but probably most of them are things like ‘Hello mom, I can’t talk, but I’m OK,’” Gage said. “That gets relayed from the hurricane impact area up to our gateways and then we tie it into the internet so it goes out by email from there.”

When commercial radios were down during Hurricane Katrina, it was one of the only ways to effectively communicate.

Gage said when impactful hurricanes hit, they result in radio communications going down for emergency personnel.

Today, operators with the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club have capabilities of communicating with area hospital networks, Gage said.

“We can communicate to the regional coordinating hospital, and in this case it’s Piedmont Athens,” he said. “Even if any one of our area hospitals were to run out of power and that’s two days, typically, we can still communicate. We can still pass information to the regional coordinating hospital.”

Without ham amateur radio operators, Gage said everyone would be in the dark.

“We would really be in the dark as far as communications go,” he pointed out. “We could still communicate with smoke signals, but all other forms of communications would go down. We are absolutely dependent upon the internet.”

Oftentimes, Gage is the face of the organization.

“It’s not because I want to be, but because that’s what I volunteered to do,” Gage said.

He said what he and fellow ham amateur radio operators do is so unique.

“And you can only appreciate that in an emergency situation,” Gage said. “Our club was formed after an Eatonton tornado back in 1992.”

Burt Cram, who lives in Mansfield, has been a member of the local club since 2016.

“I used to be in the electronic communications business and I didn’t think I’d ever want to see another radio when I retired from that job,” Cram said.

But as time went on, he changed his mind.

Cram said his grandfather was a ham radio operator, which inspired him to get his license.

Hal Reid and his wife Emilie, who live in Milledgeville, have been longtime members of the local club, too.

“I’ve been a member of this club for over 20 years, but been a ham radio operator for an awful long time,” Hal said.

Emilie does the testing for those who want to get their license.

“She’s part of the testing team,” Hal said.

A lot of what goes on in ham radio operations is problem solving, he said. 

“It’s figuring out to make this work and that go and so on,” Hal said. “We set up a satellite station over here and to make that work it took a lot of gyrations. Antennas have to go up and down, and back and forth, and follow the satellite sound the sky and they have to have a radio that you can listen to and transmit at the same time.”

Michael Tondee, a retiree who lives on Lake Sinclair in Putnam County, hopes to join the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club.

He has been involved with ham radio operations for years. At one time, he worked at a ham radio store in Atlanta.

“I actually just found this club,” Michael said. “For the past several years. I haven’t been involved in this hobby, but now that I have more time on my hands to do other things I want to get involved in ham radio operations again.”

The club recently held its Annual Amateur Radio Field Day where the public was extended an invitation to see what members do to prepare for emergencies.

It was also an opportunity for guests to see how local club members communicate with other ham operators across the country and the world.

Sgt. Paul Bernichon, who lives in Milledgeville and works at the Georgia College & State University Department of Public Safety, is a member of the Piedmont Amateur Radio Club.

“I love being a ham radio operator,” Bernichon said with a big smile.

Bernichon said the recent event allowed him and other members of the club to utilize all the tools available to them to make contacts across the United States.

“We were able to send communications via email through the radio,” Bernichon said. “We were also able to use repeaters that are on satellites orbiting the Earth.”