No one knows for sure how they got the name “ham,” but amateur radio operators have been chatting it up almost since the day Marconi switched the world on to wireless communications.

“We play with radios is what we do,” said Joe Stevens, one of dozens of hams on Kodiak.

The hobbyists spend their leisure hours looking for a strong, “five-niner” signal and trying to clear up the ones “coming in at two-two,” meaning the reception is poor. They find a unique satisfaction in setting up components that allow them to send and receive clear signals over hundreds of miles using as little power as possible

For radio enthusiasts on Kodiak, their remote location is not the impediment it might be for hobbyists who want to get together with fellow coin collectors or model train builders.

In fact, in the international ham community, islands have a special place — the more remote, the better. There are 867 islands in the world classified by a British-based ham group as contacts in an ongoing competition for skilled operators.

Serious hobbyists have been known to charter ships to reach some of the more remote shores so they can set up a station and count coup.

“It’s almost demented, the way some of them go at it,” Stevens said.

One local ham is known as a champion “DX-er,” meaning he excels at making contact with other hams all over the world, bouncing signals off the atmosphere to talk to fellow hobbyists in the Lower 48, Europe and Asia.

“My name in Charlie-Hotel-Uniform-Charlie-Kilowatt,” Chuck Mackey said, using the phonic spelling familiar to radio operators.

Mackey has collected more than 10,000 of the postcards hams exchange to commemorate their contacts on the air. Yet there are so many operators who play this game that Mackey can only know if he has heard a certain voice before by consulting his logs which go back 25 years. The brief conversations can touch on almost any topic, while conditions permit.

“What you do not talk about is politics or armaments,” Mackey noted, although the caution has more to do with restrictions on people in other countries.

Mackey took up ham radio when he operated the power plant in Cape Chiniak, a job that left him with plenty of time on his own. Now he calls amateur radio “a really good retirement hobby.”

Although Mackey is one of the area’s senior hams, most of his colleagues are adults now, and the image of Boy Scouts memorizing Morse code for their amateur radio merit badge is less familiar in these days of easily available computer chatting.

“That’s another field,” Mackey said. “They can have it.”

Yet this seemingly outdated mode of communication still has a crucial role to play in emergency situations. In case of a natural disaster, it is still often hams with their independent power supplies and intimate knowledge of hardware who can spread the word first and most reliably.

On Kodiak, amateur radio operators helped coordinate rescue operations after the 1964 tsunami, and their successors are ready to step in again. Many of the local hams are also members of the Bayside Volunteer Fire Department. They equipped and maintain a bus named “Squad 17” as a mobile emergency broadcast station. An article on the bus by John Pfeiffer appeared in the March edition of QST, an amateur radio magazine.

Hams also stay ready for emergencies through their regular activities, of checking in with each other over informal networks.

The “Motley Group” includes operators from Barrow to Ketchikan who meet on the air every night. Although most of the time the discussion is pretty light, it keeps the network ready in case telephones and computers get wiped out.

As Stevens put it, “If you don’t use it every day, it won’t work in an emergency.”

Meanwhile, the operators can have some fun and throw themselves into an absorbing hobby. (One late Kodiak ham even has his ashes placed in his radio shed.)

There are no formal classes on Kodiak for those who want to learn how to be an amateur radio operator, but Stevens and others administer quarterly licensing exams, letting new recruits into a world of unseen like minds.

“You never know who’s listening in,” Mackey said.