“Would you please keep the location a secret,” asks Louis de Kort (65) as he gives a tour of his impressive collection of broadcasting equipment. The radio hut of the fanatical radio amateur is hidden in a private forest somewhere near Tilburg. The transmitter system serves as a central post during an exercise of the Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service (DARES).
“I have an antenna here at a height of 25 meters and my own power supply. This allows me to broadcast independently all over the world,” explains Louis. The Tilburger is a radio amateur in heart and soul. From his ‘nerve center’ he leads an exercise of DARES, the organization of radio amateurs who help to set up an emergency communication network in the event of a disaster.
Louis joined DARES five years ago. “I heard a number of fellow radio amateurs talk about the organization on the radio and I thought it was something for me. I already had the equipment and I think it’s great to be able to mean something to society in an emergency. I don’t do that by the way in the field but always from my central post in this place.”
“This is quite a realistic exercise.”
For today’s training, Louis, together with a number of members of DARES, simulates a calamity in which persistent extreme heat has caused a large-scale power failure. As a result, emergency services can hardly communicate with each other and the 4G and 5G networks of various providers are also down.
In such an extreme calamity, the amateur radio operators of DARES use mobile equipment to occupy strategic locations at, for example, fire stations or hospitals. The emergency services can send messages and data to each other via this emergency network.
“We have special permits for our own computer network via antennas. This runs via broadcasting stations that are on the air 24 hours a day. It works like the backbone what the internet runs on. You can’t use it on Google, but sending emails or files is no problem at all,” explains Louis.
The Tilburger became infected with the radio virus at a young age. The spark almost literally flew when, as a six-year-old, he decided to take a closer look at his father’s tube radio. “In the end I completely demolished that thing on a table in the garden. Fortunately, my father didn’t think it was all that bad. In the end I obtained my first broadcasting license in 1980 and now I have had all available broadcasting licenses for a long time.”
“Let’s hope it never comes to that.”
Like a director of a television program, he directs his colleagues in the field during the exercise. He does not hold down the speaking key of his transmitter for a second longer than strictly necessary. Louis takes his job very seriously. “This is also quite a realistic exercise. After all, we will have to take into account extreme temperatures in the future, which can cause communication networks to fail.”
The Tilburg radio amateur works with modern equipment, but he also always has access to his ‘secret weapon’, a tube transmitter from 1964. “When our country is attacked with an electromagnetic pulse bomb, all electronics from after 1970 fail. But this old transmitter remains do it. All I need for that is power and an antenna. Let’s hope it never comes to that.”
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