[aprssig] Lake Placid (NY) Ironman and APRS

[Brian Riley (maillist)]

Last Sunday was the Ironman USA, Lake Placid, NY event. The bicycle course
was 112 miles, consisting of two 56 mile loops (a real beast, they climbed
2500 feet three times) We had a base station running APRSPoint under Windows
XP under Virtual PC on a 17" G4 Mac Powerbook . D700's on SAG-1 and SAG-2,
D7s on SAG-3 and SAG-4 (the drag).

The mountain tops their are heavily controlled and nooone would give us
permission to put up a temporary digi so we enabled DIGIPEAT on RELAY and
WIDE on the two D700s. The assigned patrol zones for the D700s were the far
out spots since they had the power. It worked like a charm.

Occasionally I peeked at my PMON and saw that the frames were often going
from one D7 or D700 to the other D700 to an outside of the valley digi in
Essex, NY over by Lake Champlain, and back to the base station at the
Horseshow Grounds in North Elba. A couple of times I was even digipeated
through my own N1BQ-3 digi over 80 miles away back in Vermont across the
mountains and lake Champlain. God knows what combination of bounces off of
the mountains made that happen!

 This time it was a proof of concept but the powers that be saw that they
more or less knew where every SAG wagon was at all times without having to
ask and plan to make more use of it next year.

We had successfully used the idea of enabling digipeat on the d700s for an
event this past Spring with the Multiple Sclerosis Walkathon and this time
it again proved to make the difference in keeping the data flow moving. We
didn't plan it too carefully but it seemed that at least one of the D700s
was always in a position to successfully digipeat the other trackers back to
base.

Cheers ... 73 de brian, n1bq, underhill center, vermont