By Ronnie Thomas, from Decatur Daily
You know it’s cold when the weather chases Larry and Tina Marks into the ham shack.
That’s a room in the couple’s Fifth Avenue Northwest home reserved for their hobby as amateur radio operators.
And that’s what happened the day after Christmas as they worked to install a tower for a beam antenna on the roof of their carport.
“In this kind of weather, you can’t get out there and do what you really want to do, so you come inside and talk on the radio,” he said.
In three years, they’ve made the hobby the centerpiece of their spare time.
“They absolutely love ham radio,” said Tom Blanton of Eva, a ham for 25 years. “Larry and I met on the radio and became friends.”
Blanton said the Marks have equipment for any communication day or night anywhere in the world, and that in times of disasters they’re available to help the community.
CB knowledge
“They’ve made quite an impression. Larry and I talk every day,” he said.
“We just decided to take the first licensing test to see if we could pass it and went from there,” said Tina Marks, who recalls growing up in Michigan and helping her dad erect antennas for CB radios.
Her husband, a 1975 graduate of Austin High School, also was once into CBs as a trucker and sold some of his old equipment on eBay.
As hams, they pushed hard from the start. They bought an adjacent vacant lot and set up an antenna farm.
“There are seven amateur bands on the radio, and to be efficient, you need an antenna for each band,” he said. “I have three wire antennas out there plus a big tower. I also have my little experimental antennas I make from 14-gauge stranded wire.”
He interfaced the radio to a computer to control any options or features.
“I’m setting up a remote through the computer that will enable me to operate the radio from any location, using my laptop,” he said.
He mounted a screwdriver antenna on the trailer hitch of his Ford Sports Trac he raises and lowers to tune to the desired band.
“I’ll spend more time on the high frequency radio in the truck going back and forth from work than I do at home,” he said.
He sports an American Radio Relay League license plate with his call sign.
“I changed (the call sign) my second year as a ham to include my initials, N4LDM,” he said. “It’s more or less a vanity plate, but it costs only $3 per year plus the tag, where a personalized plate costs an additional $50. Hams get a break on the cost from the government.”
Tina Marks said they enjoy being hams because it’s something they can do together, including traveling to various events.
“We went to FreezeFest 2010 at Summit High School in Blount County last Saturday, and it lived up to its name,” she said. “Like it is here, it was cold.”
Miracle in the cold
Larry Marks is ingenious when it comes to doing anything connected to ham radio.
He started building his own Web site, www.n4ldm.webs.com, about a month ago.
“Some of my icons link to American Radio Relay League sites, and people can log on and get all the ham information that’s available,” he said.
Marks said he works on his site periodically. “When it gets cold, you’ll sit inside and think of a miracle,” he said.
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