Kingston, NICA - With the general election nine days away, both the governing People's National Party (PNP) and the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) have reactivated their radio communication networks.

The networks operate on various channels and through the use of repeaters strategically placed throughout the island, creative engineering, and state-of-the-art equipment, provide excellent coverage islandwide, despite the difficulty of transmitting over certain terrain.

The parties' radio networks are important and indispensable tools in relaying, especially at this time, logistical information, to and from party offices, activists and officials.

The efficiency of the use of the radio networks is enhanced by the issuing of portable and mobile radio receivers-transmitters to party workers. With myriad tasks to be accomplished and hundreds of arrangements to be made and an endless stream of information to be passed on between now and election day, the parties just could not operate effectively without their radio networks.

These are "community type" networks, used to give general information and instructions, albeit guarded, if sterile, to party personnel. Anything really confidential or "top secret" would quite likely to sent by "long line" (telephone), or by cellular or by computer, having taken adequate security measures to keep out rival-party hackers.

Each party is aware that its radio transmissions are monitored by the other. Come election day, it's a battle for the airwaves as rival party engineers match skills in their effort to jam each other's transmissions. But they all have high security UHF and VHF channels to ensure that they stay on the airwaves and get their message through, at least on election day.

For their call signs, the JLP uses such Greek alphabet letters as Alpha and Delta; also there is Bravo and Charlie, Lima and Mona, etc. And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to guess who "Alpha 1" is. Variations of these call-signs are given to lesser functionaries in serial order - "Two", "Three", or mobile, etc., depending on the pecking order and some apparently special women, are assigned the handle "Princess".

In the case of the PNP, the names are more along astronomical lines: Neptune and Saturn, Mercury and Jupiter, Galaxy and Universe, with lesser functionaries being Rainbow or "A" or "B" and so on down the alphabet.