Tri-Lakes Amateur Radio Club field day to be held June 27-28

Have you been considering investigating “Ham Radio” and how you can integrate it into your own family? This is a great opportunity to find out more about Ham Radio locally! In fact, the local Amateur Radio Club – Tri-Lakes Amateur Radio Club – is excited to welcome members of the general public to both come out to observe and interact with Club setups “in the field” for the 2026 National ARRL Field Day exercise! 

This annual event is amateur radio’s premier, on-the-air emergency preparedness and community outreach event. Every year, over 30,000 operators across the U.S. and Canada gather with local clubs to set up temporary stations in parks and public spaces. Its primary purpose is to test the ability of amateur radio operators (Hams) to set up temporary, off-grid communication stations and successfully operate them under simulated emergency conditions.

Various stations will be set up where operators try to contact as many other stations as possible using emergency power sources (generators, solar and batteries) to simulate a crisis. Emergency preparedness: Simulates disaster response scenarios to test equipment, operator endurance and team capabilities without reliance on commercial power or traditional infrastructure. The Club will also have a special station setup—a GOTA (Get On The Air) station exclusively dedicated to letting non-licensed individuals and newly minted technicians experience making live contacts. Members of the general public will be invited to “get on the air” under supervision to comply with FCC guidelines.    

Field Day is a showcase for how amateur radio works reliably under any conditions from almost any location to create an independent communications network. Ham radio functions completely independent of the internet or cell phone infrastructure, can interface with laptops or smartphones, and can be set up almost anywhere in minutes. That’s the beauty of amateur radio during a communications outage.

ARRL Field Day is always held the fourth full weekend in June, and Branson’s local event for 2026 will be Saturday, June 27, beginning at 10 a.m. through Sunday, June 28, 3 p.m., at Treasure Lake RV Resort off Shepherd of the Hills Blvd. This event is open to the public and all are encouraged to attend. There will be a swap meet of radio equipment and a show and tell of unique and vintage radio technology of the past which should also be interesting to the general public. And with clubs such as Tri-Lakes Amateur Radio Club, it’s easy for anybody to get involved right here in Branson, MO!

“In today’s connected world, ham radio remains one of the best ways for people to learn about electronics, physics, meteorology and numerous other scientific disciplines, and is a huge asset to any community during disasters or emergencies if the standard communication infrastructure goes down. Ham radio is also a great sandbox for tomorrow’s technology leaders to get hands on with STEM concepts. Anyone may become a licensed amateur radio operator. There are more than 750,000 licensed hams in the United States, as young as nine and as old as 100.