Any way you look at it, the New York Marathon is a huge production. The more than 50,000 runners who start the race on Sunday, November 3, make this the the world’s largest marathon. Their route takes them through all five boroughs, from the starting line on Staten Island through Brooklyn and Queens, over the Queensboro Bridge to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, north to the Bronx and then back down the East Side of Central. Park in the park itself until the finish.
Ensuring that everything runs smoothly is a remarkable organizational achievement. The race relies on a small army of volunteers, who do everything from manning the water stations at each mile marker and making sure runners don’t get lost. offering medical expertise.
But perhaps more than anything else, coordinating an event with so many moving parts requires reliable, efficient communication. Volunteers also play a crucial role here, including a very specific group: local amateur radio (or “ham radio”) operators.
Donni Katzovicz is a ham radio enthusiast who has been volunteering at the Marathon since 2018 Ham eventa group that has coordinated Marathon’s use of the amateur radio spectrum for the past decade. He explains that ham radio essentially plays two important roles during the marathon.
The first is as a route for communication that does not require the use of official channels. ‘It is clear,’ he says, ‘that the marathon has a commercial character [radio] licenses and [its own communications infrastructure]. You [also] have all local emergency services: FDNY, NYPD, EMS. The National Guard gets involved. The secret service gets involved. And they all have their [own] radios and equipment.”
But he continues: “New York City is a big place. And if, for example, there is a runner who violates the uniform policy, or who has an oversized inflatable donut in his hand, perhaps the best use of NYPD radio resources is not to be tethered. [handling] That.”
However, in addition to chasing people with overly extravagant costumes, ham radio is also poised to play a second, more crucial role: providing a reliable and resilient backup communications method if the primary channels go down for any reason. Katzovicz says: “If there were a major failure of all the large, supercritical systems, [organizers know] that there is still a backup there.”
At its most basic level, ham radio is any radio that operates on the radio bands reserved for amateurs. As Katzovicz explains, enthusiasts are coming up with all kinds of applications for their little corner of the electromagnetic spectrum: “The hobby itself is really incredibly broad and encompasses many different parts of science and technology. Some people…have portable walkie-talkies and can talk to other licensed people near them; others make their own radios or create their own Rube Goldberg-like devices for listening and transmitting, 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 resilient.” This is because radio is a fundamentally simple technology that hasn’t changed much in decades.
Essentially, all you need for radio communication is a transmitter and a receiver, and both are devices that enthusiasts can build themselves. A simple walkie-talkie, for example, simply encodes a message and broadcasts it at a certain frequency via the built-in antenna. Anyone within range can tune into the same frequency and pick up that message. For example, in a scenario where all of a city’s power goes out, battery-powered walkie-talkies would still work fine, while cell phones would be useless.
[ Related: The rich history of ham radio culture ]
It is this lack of need for supporting infrastructure that makes ham radio so resistant to disruption. Even other forms of radio are inherently more centralized. For example, a large commercial radio station requires powerful long-distance transmission equipment. Such equipment is expensive, so multiple stations often share the use of a single transmitter. (At one point in the 1960s, all FM stations in New York City used the the same setup on top of the Empire State Building.)
This is efficient because it saves each station having to build its own transmitter, but it also provides a single point of failure: if one transmitter goes down, so do all the stations using it. (In practice, most stations today have backup transmission facilities, but nevertheless commercial radio remains dependent on a relatively small number of transmitters compared to the number of stations that use them.) More generally, the point remains that there are many conceivable transmitters are possible. scenarios where damage to vital centralized infrastructure could damage or completely disable communications capacity.
Unfortunately, New York has more first-hand experience with this than many cities. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 dealt a crippling blow to the city’s communications infrastructure, not least because the Twin Towers were home to several large mobile phone and TV towers. The attacks also exposed shortcomings in the equipment used by first responderswhich were exacerbated by the fact that a critical repeater on which that equipment relied was also in one of the towers – as was the Office of Emergency Management itself.
“Ham radio operators and the local volunteer groups helped during that time,” Katzovicz said. And while 9/11 gave rise to a whole series of changes To ensure a more resilient communications infrastructure, ham radio continues to be recognized as one excellent tool for emergency situationsits role summed up in a truism popular in amateur radio circles: “When the phones are off, the hams are on.” This fact has been vividly illustrated during the recent natural disasters in the southern US: small local radio stations and individual operators have too proved to be of vital importance in providing emergency updates, and one operator reports that several colleagues were airlifted to affected areas to restore communications with isolated communities.
If all goes well, the ham enthusiasts volunteering at this year’s Marathon won’t have to do anything more taxing than chasing oversized donuts. But if for any reason their emergency services are needed, the city’s ham lovers are ready to ensure the show can go on.
Ham enthusiasts interested in offering their services can contact Ham event.