"That was too fast for me," Shepard says. Kingsbury grabs his log book and starts scribbling. "Yeah--that was very fast contact," he says. "But he said he's in Bosnia, and he gave his call sign. ... He's doing that really fast; he might make 300 contacts tonight, all over the world."

Contacts are the currency for many in the ham scene. The number of verified, reciprocal contacts that a station completes varies tremendously, depending on conditions, time of day, and available operating equipment. Annual field days put hams to the test with a race to see how many reciprocal connections can be made within 24 hours.

Field Days in Boston Harbor

The radio society has been holding such field days for decades, but when Kingsbury became club president, he decided to step up the game. Rather than stage the event from the student-center lawn, Kingsbury rallied club members and shuttled them by chartered boat to Lovells Island, seven miles out in Boston Harbor.

Over the course of 24 hours in late June 2007, the club built and operated huge, skeletal antennas on the beach and used solar-powered generators to power them. Students took shifts sleeping and signaling, and Kingsbury--an avid outdoorsman who grew up camping in the mountains of Montana--played chef.

"It was sort of a mix between a camping trip and a radio contest with two main goals--public education and emergency preparedness," Kingsbury says. "We educate the public by demonstrating the capabilities of ham radio and the ways it can serve the community, and we show our ability to prepare for emergencies by operating from a remote, off-the-grid site with few amenities."

Club members still get a feeling of accomplishment by proving their ability to communicate with simple tools. "We can sit there at the end of the day and say, 'Here are all these people all over the world who I just made contact with,'" Shepard says. "People do this because they love it--they have passion."

Tune In to MIT's FM Radio Station

If you don't have a ham radio but want to hear MIT on the air, tune in to 88.1 FM WMBR Cambridge. The station, which launched 63 years ago, was originally broadcast from various basements and eventually was named WMBR, or Walker Memorial Basement Radio. In the early days, the station was entirely student run and available only to AM receivers on campus; it aired classical and some popular music three evenings a week.

Today, a combination of students, staff, and community members operate WMBR 365 days a year, 20 to 24 hours a day, programming more than 70 different shows. Want to hear music from prewar Japan? Early '60s soul? Interviews with legendary activists? A cornucopia of contemporary music? WMBR has it all. Listen to live and archived shows worldwide at wmbr.mit.edu.