The moniker “ham” as a nickname for amateur radio operators was initially an insult: Professional broadcasters referred to these amaterus as “” as ham-handed. But the newly dubbed hams didn’t let that stop them. Amateur radio operating took off at the beginning of the 20th century; by 1910, there were thousands of amateur radio operators, and things were getting noisy. Shoddy workmanship on homemade radios caused disruptive signals across all the bands of radio waves: The signal scattered like drops of paint, splattering onto other nearby bands and disrupting their communications.

The volume of chatter and the potential for disruptions to communications led to the Radio Act of 1912, which required amateur radio operators to be licensed and restricted them to use only a single short wavelength. Around 88 percent of hams quit the hobby, thinking this band too weak and too short to allow them any real fun.

The ones that stuck with it, though, were a dedicated lot. In 1914, Hiram Percy Maxim figured out that you could successfully transmit radio messages across long distances if you had other ham radio operators along the way to leapfrog the signal. He created the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to organize hams across the nation.

Today the United States is home to more than 700,000 licensed amateur radio operators (including every member of my immediate family—I’m the only one without a ham-radio license, having failed the lowest-level technician test).

Around 40,000 of them are part of the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (or ARES, pronounced like the god of war), a subset of the ARRL. There are branches all over the country, and ARES members are the hams that show up at the simulated disasters, ready to relay information wherever it needs to go. They helped out during disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the 9/11 terror attacks—they were the ones getting messages out even after the cellphone towers went down, overloaded by the family members of World Trade Center employees trying to reach their loved ones.

“Our primary mission is to work with local operations to assist with communications when normal means fail to function,” says Michael Corey, the national coordinator for ARES. They do this on three main levels: the local level, which would cover disasters like a nuclear meltdown; state level, which would cover more widespread menaces like hurricanes; and the national level, which might involve a mass evacuation in the event of a devastating hurricane or the loss of national communications services due to space weather events.

If you live in a hurricane-vulnerable region like the mid-Atlantic or the Gulf coast, you’ve likely benefited from ARES’s presence. “Hurricanes tend to take out large chunks of infrastructure for short periods of time,” explains Corey. “There’s about a 72-hour window when normal infrastructure is not operating at its optimum level. In a hurricane, the hams will come in and basically set up those temporary networks until other backup systems can be brought online.”