Radio Operators Tailgate At 15th Annual Event

SEBRING - So, first of all, a hamfest is not a convention for Porky Pig imitators. It's for ham operators, the guys who use ultra-long radio waves to talk around to other ham-ers around the world.

"I've talked to 75 countries," said Dave Onsted. That's Radio Dave, who broadcasts the morning show in Sebring at 105.7.

On Saturday, amateur radio enthusiasts gathered at the Agri-Civic Center. Among the crowd were 30 vendors, folks like Don Rove of Spring Lake, who sat on the tailgates of their Ford pickups and Suburbans while selling new and used microphones, books, antennas and radios.

"Will you take $50 for that one?" asked a customer, who indicated a used $60 radio.

"I'll split the difference," Rove offered. They negotiated mercilessly for another minute over that $5, but Rove finally got $55.

Inside the civic center, there were old computers, twice as large as today's models, like a Packard Bell Legend 486, but with only 640K of internal memory. No, that's not a typo. Kilobytes, not megabytes. These days, computer makers offer gigabytes.

For what would such a computer be used, besides a boat anchor? One customer explained that some radio operators, perhaps just for grins, still send each other packets of digital information, or a still image of themselves waving hello. These old machines, operating on a Windows '95 system, will do that, using a dial-up modem.

Just last week, hams were at the Orlando hamfest, which drew 10,000 people. It's the second largest hamfest in America, said Randy Payne, better known as K4EZM. (Dayton, Ohio, is bigger.)

And so what does ham stand for? People explain with lots of anecdotes, but no one really knows. Probably just came from Amateur radio.

But hams operate above the AM radio band, explained Onsted, the morning disc jockey. FM waves are relatively short, which is easily understood by realizing that FM and TV stations can't be received from more than about 100 miles away. AM stations, which operate from 535 to 1605 kilohertz, can be heard across the U.S. Ham radios start at 1800 kilohertz, and go all the way up the scale to microwave, like satellite TVs.

Payne heads a group, the Highlands County Amateur Emergency Radio Service, which uses walkie-talkies to communicate, for instance, for the county Emergency Operations Center.

"During Hurricane Charley (2004), everything was down," Payne said. But the hams piggyback their repeaters on several radio towers around the county, so they helped law enforcement talk to other counties.