By any metric, the New York Marathon is an immense production. The 50,000+ runners who are starting the race on Sunday November 3 make this the world’s largest marathon. Their route will take them through all five of the city’s boroughs, from the starting line on Staten Island up through Brooklyn and Queens, across the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, north into the Bronx and then back down along the east side of Central Park to the finish line in the Park itself.
Ensuring that the whole thing goes off without a hitch is a remarkable feat of organization. The race relies on a small army of volunteers, who do everything from staffing the water stations at every mile marker and making sure runners don’t get lost to offering medical expertise.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, coordinating an event with so many moving pieces requires reliable, efficient communications. Volunteers play a critical role here, too, including one very specific group: local amateur radio (or “ham radio”) operators.
Donni Katzovicz is a ham radio enthusiast who has volunteered at the Marathon since 2018 through Event Hams, a group that has coordinated the Marathon’s use of amateur radio spectrum for the last decade. He explains that ham radio essentially plays two key roles during the marathon.
The first is as a route for communications that don’t require the use of official channels. “Obviously,” he says, “The marathon has commercial [radio] licenses and [its own communications infrastructure]. You [also] have all the local emergency services—FDNY, NYPD, EMS. The National Guard gets involved. The Secret Service gets involved. And they all have their [own] radios and equipment.” a bearded man in a hat holds a walkie talkie while runners pass by Donni Katzovicz at Mile 5 of the 2024 New York City Marathon. Image: Alan Haburchak / Popular Science
However, he continues, “New York City is a big place. And if there’s, say, a runner who’s violating the uniform policy, or who’s holding too big of an inflatable donut, the best use of resources for the NYPD radio is maybe not to be tied up [handling] that.”
As well as chasing down people with overly extravagant costumes, however, ham radio also stands ready to play a second, more critical role: providing a reliable and resilient backup method of communications if primary channels go down for whatever reason. Katzovicz says, “If there was a major failure of all the major, super-critical systems, [organizers know] that there’s still a backup there.”
