This was forwarded to me, and I thought the information presented here might provide some ideas of what we, as a club, could be doing.
E-Box - Electronic Scoring box. Runners carry a finger "stick" they place in the EBox and that records the time and ID of the runner when they visit that control. HOC - Houston Orienteering Club. OT - Overtime OCAD - An Orienteering CAD (an excellent programming for drawing Orienteering maps.) For those of you who have seen the Lake Los Carnaros Orienteering Map, it was done in OCAD 5.0 (now offered as freeware.)
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Hi my name is Mike Urich and I'm a member of HOC and also a ham radio operator. We just finished up teaching our annual summer camp, Texas Junior Orienteering Camp, TJOC http://tjoc.us, where we were beginning to push the envelope of technology and orienteering some. TJOC is the vision of Maj Vidinha of LaPorte JROTC and is supported by the NTOA, HOC &ALOS clubs. We learned a couple of things from this years camp that I'd like to share. First we run this camp at the Sid Richardson Scout Ranch (SR2) in Bridgeport TX which is a 3000 acre facility that is longer than it is wide.
From the bottom of the map to the top is about 5 - 6 Km and we used the
entire map over the course of the week. SR2 is a very rough and unforgiving so we felt it was necessary to have good communications in addition to good medical support, we had one RN and one Paramedic on site all week.
Because my son, Chase, KC5MPK and I are ham radio operators and practice emergency communications we felt that it was necessary for us to have a map of the facility that was broken up into some type of a grid system so if needed we could call for medical at grid square "G12" and everyone who needed to respond could look at their map and know where to go without going into some long detail about where to turn off the road etc etc. We found that OCAD has a grid overlay (draw grid) feature and it worked perfectly for us. We actually printed 3 separate maps covering various areas of the main map (mainly so it wouldn't be too small) and had copies with both medical staff, myself (safety observer & communications supervisor) and the camp director. These came in handy when we had missing (OT) runners and had to mount a search. We could drop off people at different spots and tell them to go search a particular grid(s). We set the grids to 150X150 meters in size
This was greatly enhanced by using good two way radios. If you scan through the pictures on the tjoc web-site you will see a gazebo which is one of the highest spots on the facility. We set up our fixed communications center (net control station or NCS) there On events where the courses were too long for reliable hand held to hand held communications we would man the (NCS). Any time we had a missing (OT) runner and had search teams out each team would be equipped with a hand held radio and the NCS would be manned as well as we had our medic in a vehicle with a radio.
In HOC we are currently using MURS Ch5 (154.600 MHz) and we have 10 hand held and one fixed (base) station radio. Here's a couple of pictures of the antenna on top of the trailer and the radio inside the equipment trailer. Once the trailer is unloaded with meet gear we set it up for computations and NCS. These were from a local meet back in the spring.
http://www.ka5cvh.com/arespix/tn014.jpg http://www.ka5cvh.com/arespix/tn015.jpg http://www.ka5cvh.com/arespix/tn015a.jpg
Our next goal is to look into doing some type of data communications between start / finish & computations via packet (digital mode). We'll probably be using MURS Ch3, 151.940 MHz for data. What we want to be able to do is automatically update start list changes for finish and computations from start as they are made. We've also discussed how we could use APRS (another digital radio mode) to let us know who has punched an E-Box so we can evaluate where competitors may be on the course. Another benefit to the digital modes is having someone at a man control, like map exchange, sending bib #'s back to finish so the race can be "monitored" so to speak.
We're also interested in talking with anyone who has come up with a PDA interface where we could go out and check E-Boxes to see if a missing runner has made it to that control or not. We are seriously interested in what other clubs are using for two way radios (if you do) at your meets, and if any other of you techno geeks have considered any of these other items too!. I have set up an email reflector for the purpose of discussing "license free" "personal communication radio services" including all digital modes and how we could apply them to orienteering. If you're interested in joining go to http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/murs and sign up.
Mike Urich www.ka5cvh.com www.ka5cvh.com/democracy.htm
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