Two way Radios for Church activities and Missio

In the late 1970’s, there was a movie with the title “Smokey and the Bandit”. It featured hauler truck drivers using Citizen’s Band radio or CB for short, to communicate to each other. Because of illegal activities, the “bandit”, played by Burt Reynolds, needed to communicate to the other drivers through the CB radio to elude being arrested by “smokey”, CB slang for highway patrolmen.

During my high school days in the late 70’s and early 80’s, my elder brother acquired a CB radio, and for a time it became our hobby. It is a transceiver (it can transmit and receive radio audio signals), or a two way radio, with about 40 channels. It operates under a specific frequency range. Anybody with a CB radio tuned in to a particular frequency or channel within your antenna’s range can be contacted. But unlike the telephone, you cannot talk and listen simultaneously using a two way radio. While one station is transmitting, all the other stations tuned in to the same channel or frequency, are receiving the signal and audio of the one transmitting. Perhaps that is why it is called a two way radio – it can receive radio signal but it can also transmit.

When I entered the seminary at Sto. Domingo Convent, the procession of La Naval de Manila around the vicinity of Sto. Domingo Church is a big event every October. And since the procession involved traffic management, a volunteer radio group helped to ease the flow of the procession. They used CB radios to communicate and manage vehicular traffic. As a seminarian, I was assigned as the coordinator for the communication committee of the procession for several years. With the use of the two way radio, I coordinated the flow of the procession and the traffic management with the volunteer radio group.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, the Dominican Family in the Philippines adopted a community in Pampanga to help them recover from the devastation of the volcanic eruption.  The project covered relief, rehabilitation and livelihood programs. For several years, volunteers went to Pampanga every week to bring relief goods and later on to help in the rehabilitation and livelihood projects. With the help of volunteers from a radio communication group, we were able to set up VHF (Very High Frequency) radio base stations in Sto. Domingo Convent and in Pampanga.  I was assigned to man the radio base station in Sto. Domingo Convent. With the help of the two way radio communication, we were able to monitor the volunteers traveling from Manila to Pampanga. In the area of the adopted community and between Manila and Pampanga, there was access to communication by means of the two way radios.

In our mission stations in the Babuyan group of islands, north of mainland Luzon, the two way radio was a vital means of communication. Our missionaries used VHF base radios to communicate between Calayan Island and Camiguin Island, separated by Babuyan Channel about 60 nautical miles apart. With the use of this communication system, they were also able to monitor the boats traveling from the islands to the mainland. Another type of radio, the SSB or Single Side Band was also used by our missionaries to establish contact between the islands and Sto. Domingo Convent in Quezon City. It has a wider and farther reach than the VHF radio. These kinds of radios are the ones used by Japanese and Taiwanese fishing vessels for communication.

All of these communication systems we used before the time of the arrival of the cellular phones.