- And B speed.

John, take one.

Common mark.

- I have a obsession to put it mildly.

My wife calls my obsession with the lighthouse, the other woman and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the queen.

- I would consider myself a nerd.

I fully embraced the nerd.

- I got into ham radio when I was very young.

We had a ham radio operator that lived two doors away from us and I could monitor his transmissions on our tv.

He took me over and showed me his setup and I became interested.

- I see a nerd as someone who's really passionate about something and who is curious about it and wants to learn more.

- The Cape Patter's Lighthouse is exquisite how well engineered it is and I've had humorous conversations with people before that say, for crying out loud, it's a tower with a light at the top.

To me, they're absolutely beautiful works of architecture.

- I look into the environmental impacts of wave and current energy.

I think I find interest in something and I really delve into it.

It connects you with people who are also nerds and are also interested in like learning more.

- I am Jim Bailey.

I'm an amateur radio operator on the Outer Banks.

My call is N four A CT November four Alpha Charlie Tango for Ham Radio operators.

- My name is John Havel and I am a historian, researcher, and writer.

I have this company, Havel Research Associates, and it consists of three employees, myself, my wife, IIDA Havel, and my cat.

- I wear a couple of different hats here at Crystal Studies Institute.

I run a field site program for undergraduate students called Outer Banks Field Site.

And then I am the associate director of the North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program and the Atlantic Marine Energy Center.

- The one thing in my life that I can brag about I is that I do know more I believe than anybody about the 1870 Cape Patters Lighthouse, which is the one that exists now.

- The setup for our amateur radio in the Outer banks is that we do a lot of work with repeaters.

Radio engineers are men, technically trained in the field of electrical engineering as applied to radio and communication.

Our repeaters are linked.

Someone can talk through our repeaters, probably with a handheld from the Virginia State line to Rocky Mount to Oke.

We do a a lot with local nets and, and work with emergencies should that be necessary.

- The Crystal Studies Institute is a multi-institutional partnership and we have geologists, ecologists, social scientists, human dimensions, ecologists, geographers to address some of the big challenges that coastal areas face.

- I've made some unique discoveries about it that nobody had ever done before, like the black and white marble tiles in the lighthouse.

And what I discovered is that the white marble in the floor is the same marble that the statue of David was carved out of, but it was the black tiles that were difficult to identify when they were restored in 2009, 2010.

And they identified it as black Belgian that was forgotten about.

The same tiles were installed in Body Island and Currituck Beach Lighthouse and they exist today.

- I know the Wright brothers get credit for the first flight, but in 1906, the first actual AM radio broadcast was made by Reginald Fessenden when he, on Christmas Eve, he played his violin and I think sang oh Holy Night on the radio.

The radio operators on the ship were kind of surprised to hear that because nobody had done that before.

- A lot of the early communities on the outer banks would spend their winters in the woods.

Part of the way that the woods formed is because they had run Hill and Jockey's Ridge kind of protecting 'em and that allowed vegetation to go through succession.

There are communities up there that are typical of more inland communities, so we see hickory trees and sassafras trees When we can't walk on the beaches, we go into the woods to walk around and take a hike.

We have experienced that protection.

- There's such things as DMR, which is a digital mode connected to the internet and we can talk to people all over the world through DMR.

You just have different, what we call talk groups.

I have an Echo Link gateway in my basement at home.

You can pick a place in Australia and give them a call and talk to them in Australia if you want to.

I've done that before.

It's very interesting.

A lot of people around the world that used to that that have ham radio operators, some famous people, king Hussein of Jordan was one of 'em that was very popular.

- My complete call sign is Juliet Yankee, number one.

- I've never talked to King Hussein, but some people have.

Yes, radio broadcasting has come a long way.

The lighthouses are, are also very popular and a lot of hand radio operators like to see how many lighthouses they can connect to.

- Nobody has ever known anything definitively about the construction crew that built the lighthouse.

I found a letter in the National Archives dated May 13th, 1870 of pay that was due for work on the lighthouse, the 25 men.

One of them was the superintendent of construction.

His name was Dexter Stetson and I matched the names of eligible males on the 1870 census with the May 13th letter and three names at Bees next to them, free Blacks living in Hatteras Township.

So we now know for certain that Jerry Farrow, George Warner and Augustus Midget were among the people that helped build the lighthouse.

- With my marine energy research, it's really trying to understand what do we know about this system?

What types of sounds are fish making?

How loud are those sounds?

How loud is the background of the waves and the rain falling on the surface of the ocean?

If we're to put turbines there to generate electricity to meet some of our energy needs, what will that mean for these migratory species that are using that as a corridor?

And what does that mean for the productivity of that system?

- In October, a dredge smashed into the Bonner Bridge.

Years ago when the the Bonner Bridge fell, people in Hatteras lost all communication operators on Hatteras Island would send messages to the ham radio operators on the northern part of the Outer Banks and those of us on the northern part of the banks would make telephone calls or whatever we needed to do to pass information along to people's families to let them know that they were okay or what they were doing.

- Here off of our coast, we have a IC sargassum that is a really important habitat for lots of different organisms for fish.

It's a resting place for birds and there are lots of invertebrates that are kind of found within it.

Sometimes when we talk about nutrient cycling, people's eyes glaze over, but Sargassum is actually taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere and making it available to that ocean ecosystem.

And they are basically responsible for capturing all of the carbon that then supports everything else in the food web.

So it's a really important source of oxygen for the entire planet.

- Lighthouses had been around since the 17 hundreds, but at that time they had a very clumsy ill designed system of parabolic mirrors with lamps or candles even.

And it was a fire hazard.

It was a horrible mess.

But Augustine Fresnel came up with an idea and we use them today in traffic lights, headlights, this kind of scalloped prism of lenses and they were named after him for now the entire apparatus could be 20 foot high and like the lighthouse, it was a absolute masterpiece of engineering and it took that light from a 3, 4, 5 wick lamp and it cast it 20 miles out to sea.

And as we sit here today, a man in Florida is now making the perfect Fresnel lens replica in his garage.

- So I'm probably gonna get emotional about this 'cause I love my student program so much.

The students I think, coming to this program benefit from really getting embraced by the natural and human communities here.

We spend a lot of time visiting different natural ecosystems and also interacting with people in the Outer Banks community.

And so I think that the students get this really well-rounded perspective of the Outer banks.

- Our local association does a lot with community service events.

If somebody needs us, we, we do it.

And you'd be surprised how many people help us or keep up with us when they get home.

So it's, it's a good way to meet people.

- We often say this about the pyramids, the aqueducts of Rome and other stuff.

It's my God, how did they do it?

And when you think about local fishermen being the laborers that are doing this, that's astonishing.

I mean, it's poetic, you know, just the work that they did.

- Ham radio operators are real congenial group.

We come from all sorts of different fields of I, I guess life of of different occupations, but it doesn't matter because we all have the same interest.

- I've done everything from go out on research boats with International Fund for Animal Welfare when I was in high school to helping with water system projects in a squatter community in Peru.

- I see the Cape Powder's lighthouse as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell.

It's an absolutely amazing American monument.

- I find interest in something and I really delve into it.

I guess that's part of what makes me a nerd.

I am, even when I'm resting and sitting on the beach, I'm kind of observing.

I love to, yeah, just think about what I'm seeing and the processes that I'm seeing and the life that I'm seeing and appreciating this place for how unique it is and how beautiful it is.