The Highland Amateur Radio Association will hold its monthly “Brunch Bunch” coffee gathering on Saturday, June 10, according to club president Ken Lightner.

Lightner said the event is normally held at the Hillsboro Burger King during the winter, but now will move to the Harmony Lake Shelter House at Hillsboro’s Liberty Park until fall. Anyone with a present amateur radio license, an interest in learning more about the service or with a general electronics interest is invited to bring their cup of coffee and join in the conversations. It begins at 10 a.m.

Lightner additionally reminded members of the upcoming June 13 business meeting. It too will be at the park’s shelter house and will start at 7 p.m.

HARA has begun another busy season with club and community events while helping other amateur radio- and civic-minded clubs needing manpower assistance.

In 2022, the club was named the ”Dayton Hamvention Club of the Year”. Because Hamvention draws in excess of 33,500 amateur radio operators from around the world to the Dayton/Xenia area it is considered the world’s largest gathering of those interested in the service and hobby. Therefore, one may make their own judgement of how high of an honor it is to be named the club of the year. At the recently concluded Hamvention, HARA turned the honor over to a club from Trenton, New Jersey. For two of the three days of Hamvention, members manned a booth where individual excess radio equipment and equipment from deceased members attempted to find new homes.

The club recently returned to the Hillsboro Cemetery to again assist the cemetery association and the Friends of Greenwood to prepare it for Memorial Day. Members, with the assistance of a scout troop, placed flags on the graves of the approximate 1,000 veterans buried there. They will return later in the year to remove the flags and prepare them for storage. Last year this activity caught the attention of a major newspaper wire service and caused the club and the Hillsboro community to receive very favorable worldwide publicity.

During this time the club has also journeyed to and exhibited at ham radio swap meets in Athens and Piketon as well as had delegations attend meetings of other clubs in Georgetown, Wilmington, Portsmouth and Washington C.H.

Lightner says HARA has started preparations for the biggest single amateur radio operating event of the year — Field Day. The event is a national training drill used to prepare the amateur community with how to react to requests from local, state and federal governments to assist with establishing communications channels when normal channels are either destroyed or overloaded due to a natural disaster or communications disruption. This June 24-25 event will be held at the Levo Century Farm near New Vienna. The public is welcome to attend and learn how “amateur radio is there when all else fails.”

Then on Aug. 12, the club’s Volunteer Examination Team will assist the Milford Amateur Radio Club by providing Federal Communications Commission amateur radio license examinations during the annual Cincinnati Hamfest at Owensville.

In early September, HARA will again be a participant in the long-standing Ohio State Parks on the Air. That event is an on-the-air operation when clubs journey into one of Ohio’s 75 state parks, set up an emergency type station and for six hours make over-the-air radio contacts with other hams throughout North America. For the past few years, the Highland County group has had teams transmit from as many as six of our region’s state parks.

The Highland Amateur Radio Association is a group of 120 county or adjacent county citizens who have been tested and licensed by the FCC to operate on authorized amateur radio frequencies. They can use voice, Morse Code, digital, television or even satellites to communicate with others having the same interests throughout the world. More information about amateur radio may be obtained from the American Radio Relay League, www.arrl.org or by contacting the local Highland Amateur Radio Association at 937-393-4951 or [email protected].

Submitted by John Levo, Highland Amateur Radio Association.