In a radio hut in a secret location in the woods around Tilburg, radio amateur Louis de Kort is preparing for a scenario that he would rather not see happen: a large-scale failure of power and communications. As a volunteer, he can pass on messages in a crisis situation when the telephone and internet no longer work.
Louis is a volunteer at DARES: Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service. This is a network of radio amateurs that can be deployed in the Netherlands when regular means of communication fail, for example during power outages or disasters.
Louis’s love for everything to do with radio was instilled at an early age, he says Omroep Tilburg. “I was a little boy of about six years old when I suddenly discovered an old radio in my father’s shed,” he remembers. “I then completely took that thing apart. My father came home later and of course he really didn’t like that, because I wasn’t supposed to break it down. I never got it back together.”
Secret location
As a volunteer at DARES, your love for radio takes on social meaning. The volunteers are a backup to emergency services and governments. “We send messages that are in fact drawn up by the security region,” he says. “For example, we need an ambulance at a certain location, or there is a fire.”
These messages can be forwarded via the emergency network to other locations where regular communication is no longer available. The radio amateur does this from his radio hut in a secret location somewhere in the woods around Tilburg.
What happens if all communication breaks down?
The radio amateur is designed to be able to function independently for a long time. In his radio hut, several systems are ready to work independently of the electricity grid. “We have almost forty solar panels and a battery here. You can run with that for quite a long time. With a generator you can in principle continue for days, weeks or even months.”
If regular communication fails completely, amateur radio operators will immediately take action with mobile equipment. They then move to strategic places such as fire stations, hospitals and cultural centers. From these locations, emergency services can communicate with each other again via amateur radio.
Citizens can then contact employees of the safety region and public care on location with their problems or fire reports. They feed this back to the town hall, which then contacts the regional safety region. Amateur radio operators such as Louis then send the crucial messages between different locations, for example from Tilburg to Breda, or from Bergen op Zoom to the control room.