Author: brucep

Sat, 27 August, 2011

Well the VicChamps was originally going to be held near Lake Eppalock, but since noone was likely to stay over for the State Series orienteering event the next day in the same area, there seemed little point in holding it so far from Melbourne.

So it moved to Macedon Forest, only a short drive north of the city. Though we have had an ARDF combo event on this map quite some time ago, the start was from a completely different part of the map, and the course ended up very challenging indeed, even on the usually less troublesome 80m band.

The intent had been to set 3 controls of moderate distance from the start, 1 a bit further to stretch the adventurous, and 1 quite a way to provide a challenge for the more seasoned ARDFers.

The map bisected by both a freeway and a railway line provided extra route choice challenge.

Luckily the day ended up fairly windy, but quite sunny; perfect running conditions.

All was going well till, shortly after I started Adam ,the final starter, I turned on the finish beacon. Adam returned some 1/2 hour later much befuddled, having terrible problems with his sniffer. “All I can hear is the damm beacon” he complained. Turned off the Beacon again so as to test another sniffer (the beacon was close to the start/finish). Since it was a club sniffer he’d taken out initially, I allowed him to start from scratch again. A few minutes after his anewed departure, I was about to strike up the beacon again when I noticed it had 3.580Mhz written on it. But, isn’t that the fox frequency ?? I’m sure that’s wrong !

I cannot fathom why we have an 80m Homing Beacon in our kit on the same frequency as the foxes, but it seems we do !  It has now been labelled with a warning; we’ll need to get a new crystal for this rogue ‘spare’ for September.

I believe this caused some of the competitors in the field quite a degree of confusion ! It didn’t worry those on the other side of the map too much, or poor Greg, who couldn’t hear any foxes unless he was within 200m of one, but I have subtracted 20 minutes from the times of all affected competitors as at least some compensation. Sorry about that. Needless to say, the Beacon remained off after this discovery.

It seems everyone had trouble with something today. Adam’s neck pains, Darian having fence and ankle trouble, Dennis stuck on the wrong side of the tracks, Gary having trouble with new 4WD tracks, Di deflected by the dodgy homing beacon and traffic noise issues near the freeway, Greg unable to hear any fox unless nearly on top of it (tuned too high in pitch) and Grant with a debilitating cold. Still everyone made an effort and those who perservered won the day.

Here is the map showing the TX locations. Results are below.

The results are divided a bit arbitrarily into “Elite” and normal categories, where Elite is those who are ARDF experienced and would normally be expected to find all 5 in the time. There are all sorts of ‘interesting’ stats to pore over after the main results.

Results

Stats & Splits

Not a large crowd struggled out of bed this morning, especially the night after a foxhunt, but for those that did the day turned out to be very helpful and instructive. Even the weather wasn’t too bad with only occasional drizzle, and even some sun.

First exercise was to stand in the carpark and carefully try to identify which direction each of the 5 2m foxes were. This is normally a task that has to be done after starting an event under hight pressure, but the intent of today’s exercise was to illustrate how important this is. How to recognise when a bearing seems good, and when it’s doubtful and not to be trusted. The hills around the area, even though the transmitters weren’t that far from the start, made this quite a tricky exercise. No-one got TX 5 direction right, including myself (and I knew where it was !). Most of the other bearings, if not perfect bearings, would probably be enough to get you going vaguely the right way.

Since a couple of expected participants hadn’t arrived at that stage, we decided to head out and get some of the ARDF TXs now as the second exercise. Each trainee was accompanied by a trainer/shadow to give reassurance and helpful hints. Some of the TX’s were straighforward, but others were great examples of the vagaries of 2m transmission in a hilly area. Again noone attempted to wayward TX#5 (which was surprisingly vague considering it was on a high point of the course), but bagged all other foxes.

The next exercise was for each competitor to take a 2m FoxOr out and hide it somewhere in the woody (and wet) park surrounding the start. The FoxOrs were all programmed on different frquencies, Mt Gambier style, so we wouldn’t get interference problems between them should they end up too close to each other. The others had arrived by this stage so they did this exercise first. The idea was to find all 5 in the minimum time by attempting to do them in the right order. This is s simpler form of the sort of decisions that need to be made at the start of a real ARDF event. This event was won by Peter Collins (with some hints from his shadow), second Grant Geoffrey (no shadow), 3rd Ewen Templeton (he did this after his street-O run so is excused) and 4th Nick Collins. Others also found some of the FoxOrs in order to pick them up afterwards. I don;t know if Greg did this event as I didn’t see him return.

The Collins boys found one of the closer ARDF controls as a first time attempt (and brought it back). Di & Henk happened across one on their street-O run so also brought that one back. Others were picked up one each so packup was done in very short order.

Thanks to all those who turned up, and I hope you found it valuable assistance for your future ARDF endeavours.

20th November, 2010

After many successive weekends of heavy rain, we were a little bit worried… But the weekend of 20th/21st November turned out to be dry and warm, perfect for a night ARDF. We ran our event in conjunction with the Night Orienteering Championships, on the Mia Mia map near Maldon. The open bushland and extensive track network made the area ideal for night radio orienteering, and although a number of people did fall over, this did not deter anyone from finishing their course.   David set the course with the aid of Google Earth; a lot of thought went into ensuring that signal propagation would be adequate. It was so adequate, in fact, that it was picked up by a couple of hounds in Maldon, 7km away! The entire course was set to be about 6.5km, straight line distance.   Bruce stormed home first in just over 1.25 hours, despite having to waste ten minutes changing the batteries on his sniffer. Next in were Gary and Darian, half an hour later, who had ended up chasing each other the whole way after meeting up near the first control. Gary managed to pip Darian at the finish by 15 seconds. Arnneka and Adam came in next, having walked the whole course. Since they started fifteen minutes late, this actually meant that they completed the event in less time than Gary and Darian, to their consternation! Kristian, competing in his first ARDF after trying a couple of Fox-Oring events, came in next, having enjoyed himself and, moreover, having located all five transmitters! Well done, Kristian! Ewen came in afer him, and Suzanne a couple of minutes later. She went around with Geoff to pick up some tips on successfully completing ARDF courses, and found 4 Txs, so was quite happy. Geoff came in a bit later, since he wanted to finish off the course by grabbing nearby Tx 3, which was just outside the exclusion circle. The Henk, Pierre and Ryordan team came in 20 minutes later, having succesfully found 3 transmitters. Next came Mark, just before midnight, and then Peter M, who had started just as Bruce came in.   Results are below: