Surrey’s ham operators put their emergency communication skills to the test

Surrey’s ham operators put their emergency communication skills to the test

Published 3:47 pm Saturday, June 27, 2026

The one consistent communications service that has never failed has been amateur radio.

Federally licensed radio operators, often called “hams,” provide back-up communications for everything from community events to local emergency operation centres.

“It has no single point of failure—no reliance on the Internet, power utilities, or cell towers. It works when nothing else is available. In partnership with SARC, we provide funding, advanced equipment, and thousands of volunteer hours to support Surrey’s Emergency Program,” said Gordon Kirk, volunteer coordinator for the Surrey Emergency Program.

The program in Surrey is totally volunteer-based and is under the Surrey Fire Service.

Deputy Chief Shelley Morris of the Surrey Fire Service said, “Amateur Radio plays an integral role in emergency preparedness for Surrey. These operators train extensively and maintain a communications room at our Number One fire hall, ensuring backup communications for our operations centre during major disasters, enhancing life safety for our citizens.”

Ron Casey, a volunteer, added that there are two kinds of disasters: one where you can call someone for help, like 9-1-1 or an emergency plumber, but then there’s a disaster where major communications lines go down.

That’s where radio comes in. “If you can’t get a hold of somebody in one channel, you have a couple of 100 to pick from,” Casey said.

While cell phones are an important tool in our everyday lives, they can be expensive, and things can go wrong with them or with the phone networks.

With a with $60 radio, you can hook it up to a laptop and access the internet. “If the internet goes down here, I can hitchhike onto the laptop or the internet down in Seattle,” Casey said.

On Saturday (June 27) and Sunday (June 28), the federally certified amateur radio operators will put their skills to the test.

The radio operators from the Surrey Emergency Program Amateur Radio (SEPAR) and Surrey Amateur Radio Communications (SARC) set up in a private field in Cloverdale on Saturday (June 27) to participate in the annual 24-hour field day exercise, which tests emergency communication capabilities.

Thousands of “hams” across North America are expected to take part in the exercise, which is held during Amateur Radio Week (June 21-27).

“We set up our equipment and it’s a contest to see how many contacts and different methods you can use to make that communication, so it would be voice contacts on different frequencies, bouncing signals off of satellites, sending email without the internet,” Kirk said.

Kird said they expect to make “several thousand” contacts during the exercise.

The volunteers are also hoping to contact the International Space Station as it passes over Surrey at around 3 a.m. on Sunday, June 28.

Volunteers in this year’s event include recent graduates of the amateur radio certification course at a Surrey secondary school. A teacher at the school had completed his licensing classes and wanted his students to learn what he had learned.

The first RF electronics course was taught in the summer of 2024 at Kwantlen Park Secondary by electronics teacher Adam Drake. The course was offered again this past semester.

For Kirk, being a radio operator runs in the family; his father did it before him. As a former paramedic, Kirk especially understands the importance of radios in emergency services.

As a paramedic, “I got moved into the dispatch, and being that I had some understanding of how the radio systems actually worked in the background, the next thing I knew, I was the interim executive director for the province for communications,” he said. “I subsequently retired from that, and then E-Comm 911 recruited me. So I look after the radio system for police, fire, and ambulance, and transit in the entire region. Now I’m the liaison, the senior manager responsible for making sure our system is working for all of our responders in the region.”

For more information on SARC and Field Day, or to sign up for an amateur radio certificate course, visit ve7sar.net.