Members of the Sun Parlour Amateur Radio Club (SPARC) participated in the annual Field Day competition, organized by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) on Saturday, June 27. The local club pulled out all of the stops in hopes of outdoing the already impressive results achieved through last year’s contest that placed it first in Canada and 16th out of 440 stations in North America.
The club competes in the three-alpha class, meaning members are running three stations: voice, digital, and Morse Code, and are part of a club.
“We do a pretty good job, and every year we try to do more,” Mike Ciacelli, President of SPARC, explained.
“This is pretty much the biggest event of the year for amateur radio,” Clayton Smith, member of SPARC, said while communicating digitally with other contest participants across North America.
For a 24-hour period – beginning at 2pm Saturday – members set up camp in South Woodslee to compete in this year’s competition. The purpose of the competition is to contact other stations also participating. They log their contacts.
Members spent the day before setting up their equipment, antennas, and computers to ensure they were ready to go at the official start time.
Every station SPARC members contacted through the competition were logged. That log is submitted at the end of the contest, each earning a set number of points.
Smith used a digital communication program to send and receive text messages over the radio. The radio he was using was connected to a wired antenna set-up for the competition. His computer communicated with the radio, sending and receiving digital messages.
“The name of the game is to contact as many as we can,” Smith said of the competition.
Smith added the contest is basically meant to simulate communicating in emergency conditions.
Most emergency plans municipalities have in place include an Emergency Operations Centre and a back-up form of communication; that is where amateur radio comes in, Ciacelli said.
As seen in some extreme weather events, cell service or the internet may be taken out. “We don’t need any of that to communicate,” Ciacelli said, adding that municipalities usually have amateur radio included in emergency plans and typically have agreements with operators.
The majority of the funds SPARC raises is earned through working BINGOs locally, which is used to purchase the equipment the club needs. Ciacelli said the club is now going to municipalities that do not have any such equipment and noted they would like to build them an Emergency Operations Centre.
Members did that for the County of Essex years ago, he said, which was tested earlier this year when the County completed its provincially required emergency exercise.
The club also hosts training and presentations on new technologies.
SPARC’s 60 members live all over Essex County, Windsor, Chatham, and some even as far as Blenheim.
“We tend to be a progressive club,” Ciacelli said, as its membership tends to do more things.
When the next club meeting takes place, members will debrief on the competition on what went well, and what could be improved, in addition to any issues experienced with the equipment.
After last year’s event, Smith said a lot of improvements were implemented to SPARC’s Field Day game plan. That led to running new equipment this year and more efficient operations.
There are many different reasons people get interested in amateur radio. Some like the emergency communications aspect – being able to communicate when infrastructure goes down. Others like the challenge of contacting as many different stations from as many different places as they can. There are those, also, who just enjoy chatting with random people, or enjoy building their own transmitters from scratch, Smith explained.
In the Morse Code trailer set up for the event, John Charlton of Kingsville worked with his long-time friend, Doug Reynolds, who now lives in Sudbury. They both received their amateur radio license in 1964. They both belonged to the radio club in Windsor at the time, and attended university at the same time.
The duo reconnected after many years and reminisced about competing in the Field Day as a group of four in 1967 in the single-transmitter class. They thought it would be fun to recreate that with equipment of that vintage. So, Charlton found and restored equipment for them to use that year.
Reynolds decided, after that, to keep coming back every year for the Field Day.
Through the competition, contacts made through Morse Code are worth double points. Charlton said that is warranted. As antiquated as a mode it is, it is robust under adverse conditions – with simple equipment and the ability to get signals through.
Charlton got interested in the hobby as his father used to fix radios and televisions to make extra money, so there were always used radios and TVs in their basement. “I just got drawn to that.”
He stuck with it because it is a “great hobby,” stemming from having gone to university to study electrical engineering.
“This is really an exercise to try to prove our ability to set-up under adverse conditions, if we had to support the civil authorities, for example,” Charlton explained.
All operations on Saturday were run off a generator, simulating the scenario where power was down. It also acts as a radio tower, Ciacelli added.
The club received 100 bonus points for Chatham-Kent-Leamington MP Dave EPP showing up to show support during the event. He keenly learned about the operations, as participants worked away.
EPP said there are absolute real-life circumstances where this technology is needed, though he hopes that it is never needed. “But if we do, we know there are people who can set it up.”
Jay Aho may be the first international member of SPARC, being a resident of Detroit. Though the drive to get to Leamington for a club meeting is longer than others Stateside, he enjoys the camaraderie within the local group. SPARC, he added, tends to be more technical, education-oriented, and well-equipped, which he enjoys. That in turn turns into a lot of generosity.
By Sylene Argent, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Jul 03, 2026 at 14:49
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