This past Sunday I helped with the operations of the Iron Man Bike Ride in Lakevill, MN. Things didn’t go quite as planned. It wasn’t a complete failure byb any means, but it was obvious from early in the day that the weather could have been a lot more cooperative And then some.
As for myself, I knew I wouldn’t be in quite as early as I would like to have been. My work schedule is such that Saturday night I got to work at 7:00 PM to work through till 7:00 am Sunday morning. If this were any other company, I would have asked for and gotten a vacation day, but someone decided that my employer should run the department I’m a part of at the bare minimum, and if someone want’s a weekend off they can just trade with someone else for it. Well, considering what I do at the moment, that would be a bit rough, as the people I might trade withare not as ready or interested in trading as we would like. So it didn’t happen. I hear some good things are in the works related to that for the future, but I’ll wait and see on those changes.
In any case, as I was walking from my car to work Saturday night I rememberd that I had not put my HT on the charger before I left for work. While the battery was not dead by any means, it was far from being as fully charged as I would have liked. Where I was going Sunday is notorious for having bad radio coverage. They added a new repeater this year, which provided somewhat better coverage, but it ws still far from perfect.
In fact I ended up setting up a radio in my car as a cross-band repeater. I need to add a small box to my trunk now to add in an ider for when I do that. As it was, I picked the same repeater, and a non-local repeater pair on a different band, and set the radio in the car on the second band to reverse the rx/tx pair on that band so that I didn’t need to do anything ‘strange’ on my HT. With the exception of when another radio was in the area using the same repeaer, I pretty much had no problems at all on the net. I’ve heard a few people crossbanding, and all you end up with is the low frequencies, or something like that. In my case I was very happy with the results, and heard no complaints on my transmitions.
One of the things that we do at the rest stop is take down the rider numbers for any rider who drops out of the event. While there are riders who treat the event as a race, you’ll not that this is not a triathalon, and ‘race’ is not in the name of the event. The vast majority of the riders are in it simply to demonstrate to themselves that they can. And when it comes down to it, a surprising number of riders can ride 100 miles. (162 km for the rest of the world.)
The stop I was supporting is at the 70 mile mark for the 100 mile route. as a quick estimate, I would say that between 200 and 300 riders passed through the station and about 40 riders dropped out there. The number of people who dropped out is easier to estimate, simply because we had to report the rider number for each rider who dropped out. That number goes back to our network control operator, who passes the number on to the ride officials who can use that number to let friends and family members of the rider know where the rider is if they drop out. This also helps to prevent any uniquely identifiable information about the rider becoming known by people not involved in the ride. This is done for most races and events where Amature Radio operators are involved.
One problem that occasionally comes up is where one person reports a number, and the next person in the chain notes that that number isn’t in their list of numbers to report. So one or the other person has invalid information. I’m not really sure what can be done about that, but one of the things that I would like to see is an improvement in the reporting process. Riders should be able to present their rider number in a way that is pretty much self confirming. We’re getting close. Bar codes migh do it, or some form of RFID as runners use in marathons. However even those present problems with disapearing and the like. So we do the best that we can.
And we are looking at making improvements. A few years back APRS got to a point where it is inexpensive enough that almost any ham (amateur operator) can add the equipment to their car that allows them to show exactly where they are. Likewise the hardware is portable enough that you can set up a vehicle temporarily so that it can be tracked at any time.
So for events like the Iron Man Bike ride, it makes sense to add a tracker to support vehicles.
One of the things that can be done with the same service however is to be able to send other messages. Location information is simply numbers. Usually it is the latitude and longitude with an accuracy down to about 20 feet. There is no reaso to restrict the content of a transmission to location information though, another option would be to send the rider numbers via APRS.
One of the reasons that we were so busy with reporting rider numbers this year was the weather. At least one rider declared that he could handle the cold, and he could handle the rain, but the combination was just too much. We badly needed the rain, and I agree that if the temperature had been similar to that of the previous week, it would have been a very different situation.
For some 4 hours (and then a bit) I helped provide information to riders and get help for riders as well. I finally was able to get to sleep last night a bit after 9 pm. All in all, I think it was a good day.
