ALBANY — The members of the White Mountain Amateur Radio Club call themselves amateurs, but their level of expertise in setting up, maintaining and operating ham radio systems is anything but.

On Saturday and Sunday, the club kept the emergency power going to their four stations as part of the club’s participation in the American Radio Relay League’s Field Day exercise.

The stations, set up under screened shelters and in a travel trailer on the grounds of the Tin Mountain Conservation Center, were manned for 24 hours, from 2 p.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday.

The exercise called for the members of the club to contact as many other clubs around the country as they could, exchange information, logging the call, class and section of the clubs into laptops, which also recorded the time in the Coordinated Universal Time. The software in the computers kept a running tally of the contacts, and let the operators know if it was a duplicate contact.

The exercise tests the skills of the operators, expertise that could, and does, come in handy in situations where the infrastructure of other communication systems fails or is nonexistent to begin with. Amateur radio operators have provided emergency communications for organization such as the American Red Cross, FEMA and others.

The equipment was all off the electrical grid, with most getting their energy from gas powered emergency generators. Antennae were strung up into the tall white pines on the property.

Ham operators can talk directly to each other without other infrastructure.

The WMARC helps out with communication at races up Mount Washington, most recently at the Mount Washington Road Race last weekend. It will also provide emergency communications at Newton’s Revenge, the bicycle race up the Mt. Washington Auto Road on July 7.

“Our job is not done until the last person finishes or accepts an up-ride,” club member Mary Sheldon said. Sheldon had stayed up all night for the field day, manning one of the radios from 2 a.m. to 7 p.m., getting the call letters and other information from operators all over the country before searching for the next participating club, continually repeating the call words standing in for the call letters W1KJ, Class 4 Alpha New Hampshire into the microphone and waiting for an answer.

She’d heard from almost all the lower 48 states.

“If it weren’t a field day,” she said, “we’d spend more time talking.”

syoungknox@newstote.com