Brookings radio club still stays on the air (South Dakota)

Since 1963, a dedicated band of ham radio operators have kept the local airwaves busy. Technology has changed, but the members of the Brookings Amateur Radio Research Club still regularly meet to swap stories about their on-air adventures. 

“We’re a group of hams,” Bruce Bortnem, club president, said. “I think it was originally organized as a campus club. We basically moved into the city hall building at that time and continued there. Brookings has quite a number of hams per capita.”

Today, the club’s 25 members run the gamut from young to old.

“We get some members because of SDSU. They do have electronics engineering up there, and we have some engineering and computer science people,” Bortnem said. “We’ve got some high school students, too. … Actually our secretary and our treasurer had to both wait to take office because they weren’t 18 yet.”

Licensed ham operators are assigned a call sign by the FCC. Bortnem’s is KE0NWG, and the club itself has a collective call sign of W0BXO. Licenses for individuals come in three flavors —technician, general and extra — each requiring passage of an increasingly difficult test.

Read more – Brookings Register: https://bit.ly/43iN1jV