HOLLIS – It’s not lack of business that has led the region’s only ham-radio repair shop to stop taking new customers; in fact, it’s the opposite.

“It became overwhelming,” said Dorothy Peabody, who owns Beltronics on Proctor Hill Road with her husband, Bernie.

The 10-person company installs and repairs radio systems for emergency services.

Until last month, it had two employees who did part-time repair work on amateur, or ham, radios. When one of those employees retired, Peabody said, the decision was made to get out of that business because there were more requests for repairs than the one remaining worker could handle.

“We couldn’t provide the service in a timely manner,” she said. “It just wasn’t fitting into with what we could provide.”

“We’re focusing more on commercial radios, municipalities, ambulance and the like.”

The decision was hard because the Peabodys and many Beltronics employees are licensed “hams” themselves, enjoying the pastime of making over-the-air contact with others, for fun or as a public service.

And they know getting the radios repaired can be tough. Beltronics lists two other ham-radio repair services on its Web site: one is in Bow and one is in Maine.

The desire for repair work is so great, Peabody said, that over the past decade Beltronics has repaired radios mailed from as far away as Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico and South America.

“We’ve had people drive here from New York state and bring their radios,” she said.

All this business has come from word of mouth among the fairly small and well-connected ham community, she said.

Beltronics only repaired large ham radios, the “big rigs” as Peabody calls them, not mobiles or hand-helds.

Part of the issue, she said, is that ham radios are complicated compared to most emergency service radios.

“They’re very intricate to work on. … Repair is much more difficult, and they take a longer time to work on, too,” she said.

Ham radio, which involves signals that can be bounced off the ionosphere and sent enormous distances, grew because of its role as an emergency communications service, when telephone or other systems are disrupted by storms or other disasters. It has been used in this capacity locally during floods in recent years.

New Hampshire hams have formed a chapter of the American Radio Relay League, and hold annual exercises in which participants erect antennas and try to make contact with as many parts of the world as possible.

“I’m sure the repair business is there for anybody who is interested in picking it up,” Peabody said.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.