Despite the prediction of rain this afternoon, and a quite threatening radar image, somehow the rain held off till 5pm, so 20 teams (about 26 people in all) enjoyed the combination Street-O (thanks to Greg Andrews of BK orienteering club for us piggybacking on their event) and 7 2m FoxOrs.

The map looked at first glance a small area, but the tricky placement of the FoxOr circles made it difficult to chose a route to cover all options. I’d also made the time limit only 1 hour rather than the more established 75 minutes, because I wanted some time and energy left over for first time trial of our 2m ARDF Sprint event, so as it turned out no-one cleared the course. In fact no-one got all 7 FoxOrs ! Well done to Ewen who managed to get 6 of the 7, plus quite a few orienteering controls too.

Paul’s Boy’s Brigade joined us for this event too. Have a read earlier in this blog about their first trial event a month or so ago. The boys were accompanied by adult leaders or parents, some going in a team. Considering this was their first try at a real event, I’m surprised how well they did. The team of 3 came equal first, so perhaps having more people searching for FoxOrs at once helps a little. Well done to Wesley, Samuel and Cape. Achieving the same final score by deliberately coming in a little late to get that last FoxOr (a still worthwhile 8-6=2pts extra) was the other Samuel. Apologies if I have the Sam’s the wrong way around in the results below; both score cards only had “Samuel” written on them ! Hope to see you all at the August events.

Coming in a very credible mid field were Max and Scott Pendlebury, very first timers at both RadiO, and even at orienteering. Hope you enjoyed yourselves !

Next event is an 80m full ARDF at Westerfolds Park along with the MelBushO there on 21st July. The next FoxOr events are 10th and 17th August with the Saturday CakeO’s.

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See below for ARDF Sprint event report. Here is today’s CombO map, followed by results for the CombO event.

Valley Reserve CombO Event 13 July 2013

Name	Junior	2 pt controls	3 pt controls	4 pt controls	5 pt controls	FoxOrs	Late penalty	Total	Order In	Place
Ewen Templeton		2	2	2	4	6		86	7	1
Ian Dodd		1	4	4	4	4		82	4	2
Pierre Brockner		2	2	2	3	5		73	1	3
Mark Besley		1	2	2	4	4		68	16	4
Lara Bell		1	3	2	3	5	-6	68	18	5
Mark Jarvis		2	2	3	3	3		61	9	6
Jenelle Templeton		1	2	2	3	4	-6	57	17	7
Hamish McDonald		3	1	2	1	3		46	5	8
Wesley Zagore	Yes	1	2	0	2	3		42	13	9
Samuel Stuckbery	Yes	1	2	0	2	3		42	14	10
Cape Goodridge	Yes	1	2	0	2	3		42	15	11
Samuel Ng	Yes	0	2	0	2	4	-6	42	19	12
Max Pendlebury	Yes	2	1	1	1	3		40	6	13
Ryan Vernay	Yes	1	2	0	3	2		39	12	14
Dennis Mews		2	0	0	2	3		38	8	15
Dianne Shalders		1	0	1	1	3		35	2	16
Henk DeJong		1	0	1	1	3		35	3	17
Christian Chan	Yes	0	1	1	3	5	-39	23	21	18
Paul Stuckbery		0	1	1	3	5	-39	23	22	19
Spencer Goodridge	Yes	1	2	0	1	0	-12	1	20	20

After the regular RadiO competitors had a short rest and a chance to weigh themselves down with the obligatory cake and yummy thingies provided by all at a Saturday afternoon “Cake-O”, we had a another treat for them ! Our first ARDF Sprint event. This is basically exactly the same as a normal ARDF event, except the whole transmitter cycle takes only 1 minute rather than 5. Instead of being On for 1 minute each, they whip around at only 12 seconds each, making it much more suitable for a small area, such as Valley Reserve. Unfortunately I couldn’t get our new transmitters working the way I wanted, with the Morse ID of each TX keying the TX on and off, rather than just turning on and off the FM modulation. Byon, the US manufacturer of the neat little TXs, despite being away on leave, managed to send me a new version of code that should allow the TX keying to much better suit our Whoopie sniffers . Unfortunately I couldn’t get the bootloader programming to work for me in the hour I had left to try, so we had to run today with the old version. Next time will be better ! Still, it allowed us to get a taste of what the event is like (Ewen and I had a go at this on 80m at the last World Championships in Croatia…and let’s just say we need more practice !) and to iron out the bugs.

Well done to Ian D for the magnificent effort of 4 of the 5 Sprint transmitters, whilst ignoring the ire of wife Debbie who needed him to be at a DROC committee meeting “now!”. I’m sure that spurred him on. Apologies to both Dennis and Mark for throwing them in the deep end on this one; I knew it was going to be harder to DF than I wanted, due to the keying issues, but I didn’t know just how hard ! Also we either need to boost the power a little bit, or keep the area just slightly smaller than I used, if we want them all to be audible over most of the course area.

Also thanks to all those who helped picking up all the FoxOrs and ARDF Txs afterwards. Special thanks to Pierre and Suzanne, who between them found more ARDFs than any of the competitors, picking up all 5 for me. Their trick was to use 2 sniffers, one on whoopee to get the direction, and the other on FM to hear which one it is. This trick can also be done with stereo headphones on the one sniffer, but we didn’t have those available at the time.

ARDF Sprint Results

	Name	Time	Score	Gross Score
1	Ian Dodd	20:22	50	50
2	Ewen Templeton	29:30	30	30
2	Henk DeJong	46:38	30	30
	Mark Besley	DNF	0	0
	Dennis Mews	DNF	0	0