Meet the ham radio enthusiasts who help keep the New York Marathon running smoothly

By any metric, the New York Marathon is an immense production. The 50,000+ runners who are starting the race on Sunday November 3 make this the world’s largest marathon. Their route will take them through all five of the city’s boroughs, from the starting line on Staten Island up through Brooklyn and Queens, across the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, north into the Bronx and then back down along the east side of Central Park to the finish line in the Park itself.

Ensuring that the whole thing goes off without a hitch is a remarkable feat of organization. The race relies on a small army of volunteers, who do everything from staffing the water stations at every mile marker and making sure runners don’t get lost to offering medical expertise.

Perhaps more than anything else, though, coordinating an event with so many moving pieces requires reliable, efficient communications. Volunteers play a critical role here, too, including one very specific group: local amateur radio (or “ham radio”) operators.

Donni Katzovicz is a ham radio enthusiast who has volunteered at the Marathon since 2018 through Event Hams, a group that has coordinated the Marathon’s use of amateur radio spectrum for the last decade. He explains that ham radio essentially plays two key roles during the marathon.

The first is as a route for communications that don’t require the use of official channels. “Obviously,” he says, “The marathon has commercial [radio] licenses and [its own communications infrastructure]. You [also] have all the local emergency services—FDNY, NYPD, EMS. The National Guard gets involved. The Secret Service gets involved. And they all have their [own] radios and equipment.”

However, he continues, “New York City is a big place. And if there’s, say, a runner who’s violating the uniform policy, or who’s holding too big of an inflatable donut, the best use of resources for the NYPD radio is maybe not to be tied up [handling] that.”

As well as chasing down people with overly extravagant costumes, however, ham radio also stands ready to play a second, more critical role: providing a reliable and resilient backup method of communications if primary channels go down for whatever reason. Katzovicz says, “If there was a major failure of all the major, super-critical systems, [organizers know] that there’s still a backup there.”

At the most basic level, ham radio is any radio that operates on the radio bands reserved for amateurs. As Katzovicz explains, enthusiasts come up with all manner of uses for their little corner of the electromagnetic spectrum: “The hobby itself is really, really, incredibly broad and encompasses a lot of different parts of science and technology. Some people … have handheld walkie talkies and to talk to other licensed people in their neighborhood; others make their own radios or make their own Rube Goldberg-esque devices to listen and transmit, and others coordinate with local civil bodies and provide backup communications during planned and unplanned events.”

Ham radio is well-suited to the latter role because, as Katzovicz explains, “It’s incredibly resilient.” This is because radio is a fundamentally simple technology that hasn’t changed a great deal in decades.

In essence, all you need to communicate via radio are a transmitter and a receiver, and both are devices that enthusiasts can build themselves. A basic walkie-talkie, for instance, simply encodes a message and broadcasts it at a given frequency via the built-in antenna. Anyone else within range can tune to the same frequency and pick up that message. In a scenario where, say, all a city’s power was out, battery-powered walkie talkies would still work just fine, whereas cell phones would be useless.

[ Related: The rich history of ham radio culture ]

It’s this lack of need for supporting infrastructure that makes ham radio so resistant to disruption. Even other forms of radio are, by their nature, more centralized. A large commercial radio station, for instance, requires powerful long-range transmission equipment. Such equipment is expensive, so multiple stations often share use of a single transmitter. (At one point during the 1960s, all New York City’s FM stations used the same array atop the Empire State Building.)

This is efficient in that it saves each station having to build its own transmitter, but it also provides a single point of failure: if a transmitter went down, so would all the stations that use it. (In practice, most stations today have backup transmission arrangements, but nevertheless, commercial radio continues to rely on a relatively small number of transmitters when compared to the number of stations that use them.) More generally, the point remains that there are many conceivable scenarios where damage to vital centralized infrastructure could either damage or completely take down the capacity to communicate.

Sadly, more so than many cities, New York has first-hand experience of this. The World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 dealt a crippling blow to the city’s communications infrastructure, not least because the twin towers were home to several large cell phone and TV towers. The attacks also exposed flaws in the equipment used by first responders, which were exacerbated by the fact that a critical repeater on which that equipment relied was also located in one of the towers—as was the Office of Emergency Management itself.

“Ham radio operators and the local volunteer groups did help out during that time,” Katzovicz says. And while 9/11 gave rise to a whole host of changes to ensure more resilient communications infrastructure, ham radio continues to be recognized as an excellent tool for emergency situations, its role summarized in a truism that’s popular in amateur radio circles: “When the phones are down, the hams are up.” This fact has been illustrated vividly during the recent natural disasters in the southern USA: small local radio stations and individual operators have proven vital in providing emergency updates, and one operator reports that several colleagues were airlifted into affected areas to restore communications with isolated communities.

All being well, the ham enthusiasts volunteering during this year’s Marathon won’t be required to do anything more taxing than chase down oversized donuts. But if for whatever reason their emergency backup services are required, the city’s ham enthusiasts are on hand to ensure that the show can go on.

Ham enthusiasts interested in volunteering their services should contact Event Hams.