NILES — The ubiquity of today’s cellphones and social media platforms for daily communications has failed to make what some may consider an old-school style of dialogue obsolete — or out of vogue.

“There are groups all over the country doing this,” Steve Ruman, the Warren Amateur Radio Association’s president, said Saturday afternoon.

Ruman was referring to a large swath of people locally, nationally and internationally who enjoy communicating with one another via amateur radio — something in which several WARA members were engaged much of Saturday and part of Sunday morning in a pavilion at Stevens Park off North Crandon Avenue for their annual winter field day.

Beyond being an enjoyable hobby for many, amateur radio also provides a vital service, because club members also work with the National Weather Service’s Skywarn storm-spotter program to track tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, snowstorms and other types of hazardous weather, Ruman noted.

The volunteer Skywarn program has between 350,000 and 400,000 trained spotters who provide continual reports to the NWS about potentially severe weather, year-round according to its website.

One memorable weather event for which the WARA offered assistance was the May 31, 1985, tornado outbreak that killed an estimated 76 people in Ohio and Pennsylvania and damaged much of Niles, Hubbard and Newton Falls, as well as Albion and Wheatland, Pa., along with areas in New York and Ontario, Canada. The outbreak was among the deadliest in U.S. history.

Of the 21 twisters that tracked across northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania that evening, one was rated F5 and four of them F4 — the two most severe categories — the NWS website shows.

The local amateur radio club, which was established in 1938 but ceased operations during World War II before resuming in 1945, also lent its help with a more recent weather-related tragedy: the aftermath of Hurricane Helene late last year that caused catastrophic flooding in much of western North Carolina, a situation that was exacerbated by the hilly topography and preceding rainfall.

“We were used a lot in North Carolina with the flooding. The phones were out and police communications were inoperable,” Ruman recalled.

For his part Saturday, Ruman was communicating via Morse Code.

During their weekend event, members also were contesting, meaning they were seeing how many others they could contact and how quickly they could disseminate valuable information during an emergency, Michael Chambora, a two- or three-year WARA member, said.

In addition, participants were using neither cellphones nor the internet, he added.

Visiting and assisting the club Saturday was Josh Van Dyke of Akron, who is part of the Silver Creek Amateur Radio Club in Doylestown. He spent part of the time communicating and transmitting via a high-frequency radio on a 20-meter wavelength.

“I keep track of all the different contacts we make,” said Van Dyke, who added that two of his relatives — one in Ohio and the other stationed in Hawaii — communicated with each other in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In addition, Van Dyke’s wife found old information about a relative, so Van Dyke adopted the relative’s handle name, he continued.

Another piece of communication that WARA members were grateful to hear came recently from Trumbull County commissioners, who allocated nearly $6,000 in American Rescue Plan funds to WARA, club secretary Ronald Leckfor noted.

The money will be used mainly to reimburse the club for its trailer purchase and to upgrade its repeater controls, he said.

Repeaters for amateur radio are specialized devices that receive weak, low-level signals and transmit them at a higher power to extend the communication range. They also operate on very-high and ultra-high frequencies and are often placed at high locations. The club’s repeaters are on the roof of Insight Medical Center at Trumbull in Warren and a site off North River Road, Leckfor added.

The Warren Amateur Radio Club’s overarching purposes also include practicing and enhancing members’ skills to quickly set up and deploy emergency amateur radio communications with the ability to reach locally, statewide, across the U.S. and beyond, such as to orbiting satellites and the International Space Station.