OJAI VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB | home
Wayne's - Area 5 EC - Update
First, thank you for your effort and participation in the Amgen Tour of California event. We did rather well, all things considered. At the least, we got some visibility at Ojai PD and I think we can continue to generate interest in reestablishing our operating position there. The ham vertical antenna on the PD tower checked out very well on the analyzer even though it dates from at least 1986. There's another antenna on the tower that, I think, belongs to us that we should check out and resurrect. For those of you who don’t know, we took over the Chief's office for our operations. He was gone most of the time, but it was a little strange having him work at his desk some of the time while we were doing our comm thing.
I sent a long Email listing my observations on the failure of the APRs operation. What I think we have discovered is that we never got any signals through our digipeater, even though we had just checked it out and knew it was working. Then, when we were finally able to track the CHP vehicle on APRs all the way through Ojai, it became obvious that we were hearing the vehicle on direct transmission to the vertical antenna on the PD tower. Of course, nobody else in the County was able to pick up this signal and nobody else saw Dave Gilmore, AA6VH, on their map. He apparently was not digipeating through the KF6RAL digipeater in the radar tower on Sulphur Mtn. There were a number of radio reports that people were not able to see Dave on APRs. (I think he had a wrong setting on his TNC, but have heard no confession of that yet). There's a lot of discussion going on at leadership level and I expect that the “truth will out” eventually.
Everyone has been invited to contribute any suggestions and observations as to how to make event communications like this more effective and efficient. Please send along to me any criticism, questions, observations, or comments for me to consolidate and forward. There has been a bit of criticism from the other zones in the latter part of the race. Interestingly, much of the criticism is about things that had already been warned about in the race prep E-mails: Too much chitchat on the repeater, etc. Are there any observations about how difficult it was to identify the race pack and the accompanying vehicles? I know at one point two riders were mentioned and Dave jumped in and said they were not part of the race. How much of a problem was this?
Hope to hear from you.
73,
Wayne - W6OEU