Black Rock Amateur
Radio Association
Black Rock Desert? Amateur Radio? Huh?
(In other words: "What the heck are you guys talking about?!")
Please allow us to offer a little bit of background!
The Beautiful and Dangerous Black Rock Desert
The Black Rock desert comprises several hundred square miles of beautiful, desolate land about three hours north of Reno, Nevada. The dry lake bed -- the "playa" -- that makes up the desert is most famously home to the Burning Man Festival for one week each year, but it is much, much more than that. The other 51 weeks of the year it is used by campers and hikers, hunters, land-speed enthusiasts, and amateur rocketeers, among others. It is far away from big cities like Sparks or Reno. The town of Gerlach, population 600, sits at the southernmost tip of the Black Rock desert and is the closest outpost of civilization. Gerlach has a school, three bars, and one restaurant; it's a great place, but big city it isn't.
The Black Rock desert is as unforgiving as it is beautiful. It's easy to get lost or to run out of water or get your car stuck in the mud out there. Worse, the Black Rock seems to make people accident prone. And then what do you do? If something bad happens during the Burning Man festival, it's no big deal -- Burning Man has Rangers and Medical teams, plus you're surrounded by 45,000 other festival attendees. But if something bad happens to you out in that desert the other 51 weeks of the year it can be a very big deal indeed. It's lonely out there and you're far from civilization. Until recently there was no cell phone service at all and even now cell phone coverage is quite limited. If you're stuck in the desert, or worse yet, injured, it would sure be nice to be able to call somebody for help.
Enter Amateur Radio
This is where Amateur Radio comes in. Also known as "ham" radio, Amateur Radio is a hobby enjoyed by some 700,000 people in the United States (and about three million people world wide). Anyone who can pass a not-terribly-difficult test can become an Amateur Radio operator. Hams are able to talk to one other using radios ranging from hand-held, cell-phone sized ones to larger, car- or truck-mounted radios. Ham radios work much better than the "bubble-pack" Family Radio Service (FRS) radios that you see on the shelves at places like Radio Shack and Best Buy -- they have more range and more channels available to them, and there's more likely to be someone monitoring the frequencies they transmit on.
Ham radio makes it possible to venture into the Black Rock desert on a camping, hiking, or hunting trip and have some confidence that you'll be able to connect up with your friends who are already out in the desert -- and also have a way to call back to civilization if something goes wrong.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Ham radios are helped by something called a "repeater." This is basically a higher-powered ham radio with a bigger antenna that has better coverage than a little hand-held ham radio. A repeater does just what you'd think from its name -- it works in tandem with your little radio and repeats your transmissions, allowing you to talk over a much wider area. Two people with hand-held ham radios who are too far away from each other to talk directly can carry on a conversation just fine using a repeater.
One of our key projects for 2009 was to build an Amateur Radio repeater in Gerlach. This repeater provides coverage for dozens of miles around Gerlach and is the first repeater specifically intended to cover the Black Rock desert.
"Washoe County 911, May I Help You?"
While it's great to be able to call other hams, it's even better to be able to call 911 if the you-know-what really hits the fan. So, we built something called a "phone patch" into the repeater. With this, you can use your little hand-held ham radio to make a telephone call from the Black Rock desert. In particular, if you dial 911 you immediately get connected to the appropriate emergency services agency.
Calling Other Hams Over the Internet
Another cool feature of our repeater is that it allows hams in the Black Rock desert to communicate with other hams all over the world -- literally -- via the Internet. This is made possible by something called Internet Radio Linking Protocol (IRLP). You can think of IRLP as being a little bit like Skype for ham radio -- it allows radio conversations to be routed over the Internet, so a person in the Black Rock desert can talk to someone in, say, Sydney, Australia, or just about anywhere else.
In 2009 we deployed two separate IRLP setups that hams can use to call in and out from the Black Rock.
Where Are You? (For That Matter, Where Am I?)
Another nifty ham radio technology is the Automatic Position Reporting System, or APRS. It's the marriage of ham radio and GPS positioning. APRS allows hams to broadcast their location to other hams and to see where other hams are in the nearby area. This is super useful when you're out in several hundred square miles of desert and are trying to find your friends' camp.
In 2009 we also set up an "APRS digipeater," which is a repeater for position reports. It allows all hams in the Black Rock to see each other's position reports. It also sends these radio position reports out onto the Internet where you can watch them in real time on various web sites.
How This All Came About (And How You Can Help)
Our efforts in 2009 to build and deploy all these things really did start with just some talk around a camp fire in the Black Rock desert: "Wouldn't it be neat if ...?" Since that time, a whole lot of hard work from a whole lot of people has made the Black Rock Amateur Radio Association a reality. If we haven't exhausted you with the above gentle introduction to ham radio and the Black Rock desert -- or even if we have :-) -- please head back to our 2009 Fundraiser page. There you can read more our efforts over the last year and support us with a donation..