Well the weekend is now over…
Saturday and Sunday I spent the best part of the days in the shack acting as the Net Control Station for the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour.
The tour runs from Carleton University in Ottawa to Queens University in Kingston Ontario where the participants spend the night. On Sunday they make the return trip and finish at Carleton in Ottawa.
Safety COMMS for this event are provided by the Amateur Radio Community. The Ottawa Leg of the Tour (Ottawa to Just before Perth Ontario) was handled by a group of independant operators under the leadership of Gord VE3FRB.
Once they left our coverage they were turned over to the Lanark North Leeds ARES Group who in turn gave the tour to the Frontenac ARES Group as they approached Kingston Ontario.
The same basics applied on the return trip.
The Ottawa Leg of the tour in detail is here
The rest of the route (best guess) is here
Sorry about the lack of detail after the Ottawa Leg but as I had no contact after my groups participation I’m not sure exactly how the other groups looked after things. I do know some of the operators in Perth and Frontenac so I have no doubts that all went well. I heard no complaints at my end and all appeard to run smoothly.
We used one or two operators at all of our locations and we for our leg of the tour we used the VE3RIX Repeater which is owned and operated by the Manotick Amateur Radio Group. This is a wide coverage 2m Repeater and it worked quite well. It has IRLP and ECHOLINK capabilities as well but the services were not used for this event.
In addition to the checkpoints we had one Tour Manager who was radio equipped and radio operators on a first aid vehicle, two sag wagons (support and recovery vehicles) and also a radio operator on one of the two mobile repair vehicles. The 2nd mobile repair vehicle ran with no radio operator but he did have a scanner set to the various repeaters used throught the tour so he could hear where he was needed
There were some complaints from the general public about the riding skills of some of the riders but anytime you put 1300+ riders out on a route they are bound to get someone upset…
There were no serious injuries but there were a couple cases of “road rash” so I would have to say the tour was a success along with a successful test of Amateur Radio. I hope to be asked back to participate again next year.
73bob
Tags: amateur radio, Amateur Radio Public Service Event, Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour
June 9, 2009 at 11:50 pm |
You did a great job Bob… I hope you will be invited to do it again next year.
June 9, 2009 at 11:54 pm |
Thanks Jamie, Its easy to do a good job when you have a good crew to work with… Gord has already asked me to keep the weekend free for next year… Health permitting I plan to be there…
73bob
June 10, 2009 at 12:49 am |
I dropped in at Ashton and we had a crew there helping out. I was listening in on the net while we worked simplex. You did a great job on net control. A well run net, indeed.
I might be giving a little talk about the results of the rally, and I was wondering if you had any stats about how many stations and operators where there. Any luck you still have that info?
June 10, 2009 at 2:39 am |
Jean,
On Saturday we had 13 checkpoints manned by 19 operators. In addition we had 7 mobile positions with 7 operators and one NCS with one operator.
This is a total of 27 Amateurs on Saturday.
On Sunday we had 12 checkpoints manned by 22 operators. In addition we had 5 mobile positions with 5 operators and one NCS with one operator. This is a total of 28 operators.
Each operator did about 6 hours with a few more contributing more so if you were looking at man hours it would be close to 350 Amateur Radio Person Hours just in operations. Several of the Amateurs also had administrative duties and their admin time would of been extra…
Thanks for the kind words about the net… Like I said earlier its easy to to do a good job when you have a good crew to work with…
73bob
March 19, 2010 at 4:19 am |
[...] year I participated in this event and had a great time. If you follow this link you will go back to last years blog entry on the [...]