Region 3 ARDF – 80m event tomorrow

The Region 3 ARDF competition finishes up tomorrow with the 80m event. Stay tuned for more information, and check out the results of earlier events by going to http://r3.ardf.org.au and selecting the Results and Start Lists menu option.

Region 3 ARDF – Tour Day

Participants were afforded a sleep in this morning with breakfast served at the more sensible 8am. The agenda today would see competitors and officials enjoying a Steam Train ride from Maldon to Castlemaine, followed by an underground tour at the Central Deborah Gold Mine. Lunch was a BBQ  complete with Aussie favorites Kangaroo steaks, Lamingtons and Anzac Biscuits.

A walk to the train station got the day started where some of the competitors were treated to the opportunity to push the loco around on the turntable.  After some shuffling of locos and carriages, we were soon on our way.

The trip was quite relaxing with a team even enjoying a animated game of poker (Chinese style). Every imaginable camera was working overtime as the train rattled down the tracks towards Castlemaine.

The trip to Bendigo was made on 2 buses and we were soon arriving at the Central Deborah Gold Mine for our BBQ lunch and underground mine tour. This Mine was origionaly dug to a depth of more than 400m, however today we were only taken to a depth of 65m. The tour lasted 45minutes and our great host Laurie kept us entertained with rock drilling, fools gold, real gold, pretend blasting and drop bears.

Lunch was served by about 8 orienteering volunteers who had cooked up a feast. Six or so salads, cold drinks and deserts were also well received. An impromptu lesson was given “Having a BBQ Aussie style” Class 1 was how to eat a sausage in bread, this was mostly due to us running out of plates. The Kangaroo sample steaks went down a treat and proved very popular. After lunch we enjoyed activities such as quoits, horse shoe tossing, gold panning, and various machinery and static displays. At departure time we discovered that that we had lost 2 Chinese team members. A quick run around the small area revealed that they had disappeared to the local bank (5 blocks away) to exchange currency. We were soon all back on the bus returning to the camp.

 

Region 3 ARDF – Equipment test and Opening Ceremony

The day started early with selection of cooked or continental breakfast on a cold morning. We were soon filling onto the two buses for the short drive to the Model Event. The model event serves as an opportunity to test out receiving equipment as well as familiarity with both the mapping style and the terrain. The full compliment of 5TX and homing beacons were available on both bands HF and VHF. This event was set on the Blowmine Map. Maps were handed out and after some initial testing the competitors headed out to test their receivers. Competitors were allowed 2 hours for this testing which allowed plenty of time to adjust and calibrate their equipment for the Australian Forrest. Many Kangaroos were seen on the course, which was a highlight for the international competitors, for many of them this would have been the first first time they would have seen one in the wild.

Lunch was next on the agenda, a smorgasbord of cold meats, salads, fruits, cake and drinks. Shortly after lunch was the Combo Street Orienteering and Fox-or-ing. Street Orienteering is a navigation activity where the points are marked accurately on the map. Fox-Or-Ing on the other hand is a combination of Radio Direction finding and Orienteering skills, The control circles for fox-or define an area of 300m diameter, whereas the orienteering is marked as a precise location. The locals thought that the gold rush with soo many people racing around with Gold Detecting (look alike) equipment.

The opening ceremony was soon after which was held in the local community hall, MC Robert VK3DN setup a PA in the hall so everyone could hear the speech by IARU Region 3 Chairman and WIA President Michsaael Owen VK3KI. Michael greeted guests and welcomed them to Australia and then officially opened the competition, wishing everyone well in the championships. Jack Bramham VK3WWW WIA ARDF Coordinator also welcomed competitors to Australia. Everyone then grouped outside for a participants group photo. Many cameras were working overtime not to miss any of the action.

The Team Leader meeting was held were team leaders and international referees were given the time line of the first competition which would be held early tomorrow on VHF. Rule changes were queried and last minute questions were answered. All competitors were tucked into bed early in preparation for an early start in the morning.

Region 3 ARDF – Maldon, Arrival Day

Well the big day is finaly here and the last bus load of overseas competitors has just arrived in Maldon at the Blue Light Camp. These competitors have traveled from as far afield places as USA, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, China and Malaysia. The overseas competitors combined with the Aussie team bring the total competitor count to around 100. Those who were lucky to arrive earlier today have enjoyed their first Aussie roast meal. Having oriented themselves with the surounds of Maldon they are now mostly tucked into bed. Although a few JA’s can be heard downstairs working a Morse dogpile on HF.

Tomorrows activities begin with breakfast at 7am, this is followed by an equipment try out soon after which allows them to familiarise themselves with the Aussie bush and mapping style. Later in the day is a combo radio and orienteering around the streets and lanes of Maldon. At 5.30pm all competitors and officials will convene to the town hall for the official opening ceremony. The first competition will be on VHF on Sunday not too far from Maldon. The actual location and map is kept secret until the buses arrive at the quarantine area. Monday is a sightseeing and recovery day which will start with a Steam Train trip to Castlemaine, and conclude with an Aussie BBQ at Bendigo. The final competition on 80M will be on Tuesday, the last official activity will be closing and awards ceremony nearby on Tuesday night.

Stay tuned for more news as it comes to hand..

Reports on the 14th ARDF World Championships

September 2008

balcony
ballroom
hotel
hwaseong
view

After 2m event:

Today was of course the first day of real competition, but perhaps I’ve got ahead of myself. Maybe instead I’ll add a bit of suspense by leading up to it via what’s been happening yesterday as well, as at the time of writing I can’t see the results on the website yet.

Yesterday we all trooped onto the buses for the practice event.

Training map
Training

It is a mix of mainly dark green (jungle) and what appealingly looks like open land (orange) till you check the legend which tells you it’s “cultivated land”: read mainly rice paddies. This one was largely a matter of sticking to the tracks and making a short excursion off the side right near a transmitter. I found 3 of the 2m ones without too much difficulty, but then my sniffer crashed. I hadn’t experienced this particular problem btraining.jpgefore, but later investigation by Bryan showed it was a combination of flattish batteries and a falling apart battery holder inside the sniffer. Well I guess it’s had a fair bit of use !

Kids

Easily fixed with new batteries and carefully placed bits of cardboard packing. At the time on the practice event I couldn’t un-crash it, so luckily I also had my 80m receiver with me, so I swapped over to that. Turns out 3 of the 5 were co-located anyway, so I ended up going to most locations anyway.

Bryan, on the other hand, was having terrible difficulties on 2m. Later on, after he’d given up in disgust and found at least some 80m transmitters, he discovered he’d assembled a “Geoff Special” beam (ie. backwards).

Bryan Training

The good thing was all these teething troubles ocurred at the practice event, so we could confidently go into the world champs event today with everything fixed (I carried a spare receiver today in my camel back anyway, just in case).

Control
Flag Bearers

The opening ceremony was another bus ride to nearby Suwon University. They issued us with translation receivers (good idea…that should cut down the length of the speeches!) and another Aussie flag (on a pretty pole with a gold ball on the top). Then announced that each country should appoint two people to march/carry the flag. After extensive debate within the team we came to the conclusion that Bryan and I would volunteer for this role. With all the other Ark animals (2 by 2) we were ushered out of the main hall to spend what seemed hours but was probably only 30mins or so for some introductory drumming thing to finish (I’m not quite sure; we weren’t there!) and on we marched onto the stage.

Flags

Australia being of course 1st as this was to the English rather than Chinese alphabet. Noone had told us what we were meant to do, or whether we were meant to be staying on stage till everyone else came on, but it turns out they wanted us to march off again.

logies

After all the countries (31?) had their go , it got down to the real entertainment, and I have to admit, unlike many other cermonies, it was actually pretty good. Sort of a mix of traditional Korean musicical instruments, but updated music, singling girls and the B-Boy breakdancers.

Korean

Speeches…well, all I can say is luckily we didn’t have to listen to then twice (Korean & English).

sign
garden

On out return we were ushered straight off the buses to the gardens where dinner was served in a garden party setting. Very pleasant in the cooler evening. We were invited over the the Croatian team table and had many discussions about ARDF participation, juniors development and garmin GPS’s. Seems they have managed to get some funding through their education department (it wasn’t easy) to run schools ARDF programs.

garden

Sounds a bit like what Peta does, but more developed within each school itself (so it’s self sustaining to a degree; some schools even trying to get competitors into Region 1 junior champs). They don’t seem to have as much traditional foot orienteering development; perhaps they got in first. The next world champs are to be in Croatia in 2010.

garden

Straight after dinner it was off to a Region 3 meeting to consider the bid from Thailand to run the 2009 Region 3 championships. it’s not official yet, but it looks like they could well be happening there in November next year, so keep that free ! We need a bigger them than just 2 of us.

Fall into bed after getting everything ready for the early start this morning. Lucky for the 1 hour time difference so for me the 5am start was more like 6am ! Even so sleep was slow coming last night, but spare a thought for the teams (eg Croatia) who have ended up with thin 1cm futons on the floor rather than beds. Luck of the draw it seems. I’m glad we arrived earlyish on arrival day.

Well, finally I’m up to the 2m VHF event today. As a mini spoiler I will point out we both finished in time with our required 4 controls (transmitters found). Doing M40 we had to miss transmitter number 5.

2m Start

The early start in the morning is because all competitors have to be bussed to the start. At a championships the location is meant to be a secret, unlike traditional orienteering events. Also, all the receivers have to be impounded at the start before the transmitters can be turned on. Due to some slight mixups in all this (I think we did it better back

2m Start
Grave Sites

in 2003) the actual first start was delayed 30mins to 9:30am. My start was 10:20 and Bryan’s 12:05pm.

It was pretty hot and very humid.

The M40 start corridor aimed directly at TX#5; the one we didn’t have to get at all. This caused most some confusion. In fact, the quickest way out was to run back through the Start, but we weren’t too sure if this was even allowed ! Very messy anyway.

2m Map

My route was to go to a slightly more distant #4 prior to the closer-to-the-start #3 so that I could use a main road at the edge to bypass a lot of nasty looking deep green across the middle of the very elongated map (a little bit longer than A4 long, but narrower). As it turns out, my gamble did work out, and though it may not have been the quickest route, it was easy navigation and running (for some of it). I’m not sure if I’d gone 3->4 if I’d have a better time or not; even drawing out my route later on the map it looked pretty good.

After bypassing a range of deep green in the middle, I cut in from the road to #2, which turned out to be on my side of the green range (phew!!).

The road was fast running, and the deep green was passable in places, especially on the ridges, but the rice paddies (orange) were often slow as the little pathways amongst them didn’t always take you where you wanted.CIMG2219.JPG

My time was 94mins and 52s, putting me in 14th place out of 46.

Bryan zipped out of the start faster than I did and took a different approach, aiming for the road on the far side of the map. He ended up doing the same control order as I did, but suspect considerably more km.(16 or more). Still, he’s happy he got the required 4, was back in time (just) and knew where he was on the map nearly all the time. His place was 24th, with time of 115 mins 47s, unofficial results at the finish.

Bryan

Pity the poor competitor I was speaking to just after I finished who was overtime by a mere 5 seconds !

The time limit was 140 minutes.

Our 2m team result was 8th in the world.

Looking out the window looks like it’s going to be another garden party for dinner and presentations.

After 80m event:

OK, enough with the subtle suspense. The big news is Bryan not only came in the top 10 in the world, but at last sighting of the results he was 6th !

Well done Bryan (cheers, whistles etc.).

80m Start

Bruce didn’t do quite as well today, doing a transmitter out of order. I still made it in time though, so we will have a team result. My day showed how one little silly trivial problem can blow out to muck up your whole event in ARDF. It also maintained our normal tendency to each only do well in one of the two events, showing just how important it is to have 3 members in each team (to take the best 2 results of the 3). [In Japan we were lucky in that both Bryan and I did well in the same event. Unfortunately not so this time.]

80m sniffer

Now to backtrack a bit to fill you in on what’s been happening.

Thailand for the next region 3 is becoming more firm. The dates are likely to be Oct 29th -> Nov 3rd 2009. We need more people to go on this one !

Garden party dinners seem to be the norm now rather than the exception. Very pleasant outdoors in the evening. I think at least one of both of dinner and farewell party will be in the garden this evening.

Clouds

Today was the hottest yet. It is currently 29Deg and that’s on the top floor of this hotel.

The event today was suitable billy goat territory, so it suited Bryan perfectly 🙂

I will try to put a photo of the map up soon, but it might be hard to decipher with all the various routes drawn on it, and part of the top section has gone missing.

Been catching up with lots of friends. Others may remember Kurt Smet and Maurice from Belgium, Jon from Norway, DavKa from Mongolia, Guilliame from France (without the rest of the family this time), Gyrui and Vadim from USA (or Hungary) and the rest of the US team (Gyrui placed 3rd on 2m), Mr Park from Korea, Mr Arisaka and Horishi from Japan, Alex and Nicolay from Kazaksthan and many others I’ll probably get in trouble for not mentioning.

Buses
King Grave

Tour day yesterday was pretty normal fare. We visited the Hwaseong Fortress (did we go there last time at Nonsan 1999 ?) and some tombs. One interesting thing we found was the strange perfect mounds we’ve been seeing on our courses (picture will be up) are in fact the graves. Often no tombstones. This helps as they are marked on the map as grave sites. Another visit on the tour day was to Samsung. This was interesting, but less thrilling than you might think because, being semiconductor fabs (ultra clean rooms, secret technology etc), they can’t actually *show* us anything, so it’s really just a touristy static display and a video. The more interesting bit was the technology update from one of their PR guys (an ex-pat American), but essentially, all of this could be done anywhere. The pure scale of the plants is very impressive though. It’s a mini city in it’s own right.

Tour Day
Tour Day
Tour Day

Here’s some more details of today’s 80m HF event for those that are interested:

The terrain was similar in many ways to 2m. The orange areas were again cultivated areas mainly rice paddies, but they had less impact than on the last map. The forested areas were largely dark green, but though un-runnable, it was nearly always navigable. Sticking mainly to tracks where possible was still important, but event that was tricky occasionally as sometimes they weren’t exactly as documented on the map, or simply didn’t go through to where you wanted. The hills were definitely steeper. This was certainly a tough event physically, and this seems to be traditional for 80m.

80m map

My small mistake at the start seems so trivial, but had ramifications. I cut the 52cm long map down to nearly fit in my map board, but a few cm still had to be folded around the back. In so doing, I barely noticed I cut off the only North arrow on the map. Whilst walking to the start line, I had a sudden panic I’d inserted the map upside down relative to my compass rose which overlays the map. I convinced myself that I’d done it upside down and pulled it out to right it. After ‘fixing’ that I tried to work out where the start corridor went on the map. After some confusion I worked out I really had had the map right originally, and I’d just stuffed it up. Now in a bit of a blind panic I whip out all the mappy parahenalia again, on the start line on the ground, and right the map again. I leave the extra bit hanging out the end instead of folding it over the top as I’m just about the start. Off we go….and dammit the start corridor and where it’s heading is right underneath my pencil holder velcro. Well I run the start corridor anyway, trying to get a bearing for #1 at the same time as trying to pull out my map. I’m all a bit flustered and things simply aren’t going well. Instead of trying to fix things carefully I followed competitors whilst trying to navigate on bits of map flapping out the end. Forget about drawing any bearings ! Well, I did get to 3 eventually, having to do a very steep uphill climb in the forest only to have to go down to the transmitter in a valley. Now I’m effectively running blind as I’ve now lost map contact completely, but I get a good time to the next ‘strongest’, #2. The problem is, I only have the vaguest idea where #1 and #4 are (M40 skip #5), so I decide to head in the general direction and figure it out on the way. Luckily a large open area lets me relocate myself on the map. Unfortunately, if I’d been a bit more accurate earlier on, I’d not have tackled a super tough hill up to #1 now, but after #4 instead. Alas, I ended up doing #1 not far from the finish, followed by #4 pretty close to the Start. As you can imagine, this is somewhat of a detour ! Still, I made it back in 120mins, which is OK considering running up mountains may not be my strong point and having to do it twice due to the #4 detour. Incidentally, I had to go back within 10m of #1 on my way back to the finish.

That gave me 23rd place or so, which indicates it was a pretty tough event for others too.

Bryan did a much better order, ducking in to get that tricky #4 after he’d been up to #3 from the start. He still had to do the mountain climb, but only once 🙂 His time of 83mins gave him 6th place, a fantastic result, just after Vadim from USA (Hungary).

Massage
Beer
Results

Our 80m, team result was 6th in the world.

Karel Fuchik

A few extra notes:

  • In the 80m finish pic of me I had just passed the Czech Girl (whohad passed me earlier). No doubt her time was much better overall, but in true BK/Sledge fashion was determined to get a good finish split (57s, Bryan 52s)
Bruce
  • Uli (brother of Wolfgang) from Germany may well attend our Lilydale Lake event next weekend.
  • Robert from UK knows Mike Dunbar. Mike may move back to Melbourne, perhaps.
  • We’ve been invited to a lake-based paddla-radiO in Holland, and the Czech 4 days Radio Orienteering, both July 2009
  • We sort of missed our transport this morning (due to a misread notice (5am not 6am), but all was well as we were able to catch an airport bus after a short taxi ride. The Mongolians seemed to have the time even more incorrect, but one was sighted at the airport so it seems they made it !
  • We liked the bottle of Aussie 2001 Red so ended up buying another, and testing it on the French (!), and they agreed it was actually pretty good.
  • Dinner and Farewell party were both in the garden, but it was good they were separated by the awards ceremony (so you could at least eat some dinner prior to all the gift swapping frenzy).
  • Talking to many competitors, it seems though we had some difficulties with the 80m course, others had an even tougher time. Almost all of the Americans were overtime, and many of those we know didn’t get their full set of transmitters. Our Croatian M40 friend twisted his ankle.
  • Bryan would like to inform you that one of his thumbs is now nearly double sized due to reaction to a suspected spider bite on the 80m event.

Japan Region 3 ARDF 2005

Report 1

Hi Everyone,

This is my first instalment for the Japan trip. Of course we haven’t made it to the Radio event yet (since when have we ever been boring and gone straight to the event ?). It’s late on the night of our second night in Japan and I’m typing this on my laptop whilst lying in bed. Had a few ales, so the prose might be lacking, but more about that later.

Firstly, yesterday. A day of plane trains and automobiles. Well you know we’ve made it here, so at least it didn’t go completely awry, but there were a few moments there where events tried pretty hard to unravel. For instance the lovely time of the 6:05am flight from Sydney airport we’d managed to put so far the the back of our minds that the implication of having to get up prior to 4am hadn’t entirely sunk in till we had to set the alarm clock whilst chatting to my cousin Jenny at their place in Sydney the night before. Or maybe the fact that after heaving out of bed at that pre-dawn no-existent time of the morning, the taxi ordered the night before didn’t arrive, and continued to refuse to arrive, despite increasingly panic-ed calls to the Taxi company, 20 minutes later ! It’s perhaps just the way things go that it wasn’t till just *after* I’d woken aforementioned cousin Jenny (who had already had to cope with an very unhappy infant at midnight), that finally a taxi driver got around to accepting the job and rolled up outside. “Errr sorry Jenny, bye….”

All seemed to go smoothly for a while, till the puzzled girl at the Qantas check-in counter wanted to know what flight we wanted to check in for at that hour. We knew we were going via Brisbane, but nothing had made us wonder if the Sydney-Brisbane leg might be actually be a domestic flight. Yep, you guessed it…wrong airport ! So another taxi ride (the shuttle bus doesn’t operate that early). The taxi driver wasn’t at all keen either, as he’d now lost his first place in the taxi rank, carefully gained, he lost no time in telling us, by getting to the airport at 2:30am. Still, it’s a domestic flight, right ?, we don’t have to be as early for that ! We’re still going to be ok. Phew.

Ok, (boring), it was. A bit tight doing all the Immigration stuff in Brisbane, but made it through ok and we weren’t even the last on the Tokyo flight !

New Ontani Hotel organised for us at special discount rates by our man-on-the-ground-in-Tokyo, Douglas, turns out to be pretty spiffo, and though it’s expensive by our standards, it’s real real bargain for the centre of Tokyo. For those who have no idea who Douglas is: He’s an Aussie living here who used to foxhunt with the YQN foxhunt team from when he was a teenager.

Not only did he organise the Hotel, but we did the tricky business of booking all our train tickets for our stay here (we’re all doing slightly different things) this morning at the Tokyo Central station this morning, but also has been showing us around today.

Few use cars here (Douglas doesn’t own one) which means the public transport really has to work well, and it does. Much use of the subway and train system, and plain old walking, and we did a mixture of the tourist thing and lurking in the odd but amazing electronics (and amateur radio stores) district. The new stuff wasn’t particularly cheap but the second-hand could have some real bargains (in we had the room to carry it!). Good junk :). We also fitted in a pleasant river boat trip under the many bridges, a trip up a tall tower for the view and and a quick look at the the Roppongi (sort of red light) area this evening after dinner. Oh and Sue, we managed to hold Mark back from all sorts of evil temptations and he is safe in (his) bed.

Oh yeah and the beers ?

Well the beer glasses were kinda large, but Douglas assured us that lurching about in public is perfectly socially acceptable in Tokyo (afterall noone is driving home), and in fact is to be almost expected, and let me buy you another beer…

Weather is not too hot, but quite humid. Fine for walking around but could be hard going for the competition. Sleep time. <Coughs loudly to wake up Mark enough to stop him snoring…>

Report 2

Back again for the 2nd instalment !

If all went well Douglas should have been able to send out the first one this evening.

Unlikely to have a chance to get onto the net myself till tomorrow (Monday), so no pictures yet.

Tomorrow we take the fast train north to Niigata and the Radio competition, but I’m getting ahead of myself !

Today ?

Well it was a little warmer today at 32Deg, but according to Douglas perfect weather compared to last week when it was stinking hot & humid. Hmmm, well these things are all relative as it felt pretty hot & humid to me already !

Waited for Douglas at the subway station for a while till I timed out and went in search of a phone to call him. Seems it’d been a big night (4 bars worth) last night and he’d only managed to get home at 4am. We took pity and elected to meet up with him later this afternoon.

Sony building in Ginza: Mainly a showcase for Sony products. Aibo robots were cute but otherwise not as impressive as I’d been expecting. Lots of dull laptop displays and endless home-movie setups. Nice, but…

Back to the subway again (just follow the colour coding) and along the street leading to Meiji, the largest shrine in Tokyo. Temples are Buddhist, Shrines are Kinto and they happily coexist. Due to the public holiday this weekend we were lucky to witness a number of ceremonies where the gods go portable for a day in hand-Bourne shrines.

All the shrine-bearers wear traditional costumes (except two who seemed to be wearing only shirts (very odd)) and chant, drum and bounce the shrine along the way (must be a bumpy ride for the god!).

Grab some lunch along the way up the tree-lined street and meet Douglas who has emerged from his cave. Go to have a look at the Goth girls. For some reason they all like to dress up Goth and congregate in one particular square.

Many are weekend-only Goths who return to normality for work & school midweek. They were there again today, but not in huge numbers, possibly because of the warmth in the sun, or the public holiday weekend (some more non-posing-Goth things to do perhaps).

Even more disappointing was the poor showing of Elvis’s at another nearby square that Elvis calls his own. Yes a few there, but mainly sitting merely listening to Elvis tapes. It seems Elvis had left the building.

Despite this being a very central part of Tokyo, a large area of park and forest surrounds the shrine. Since it looked so shady and inviting we walked through up the forest path to the shrine. There was even a wedding while we were there, so we got to see a priest or two as well.

One of the interesting parts of life here are the Pachinko machine halls. These are like pokies, but involve launching metal ball bearings around what is a bit like a vertical pinball machine. Occasionally it pays out in yet more ball bearings.

Since gambling is officially illegal here, you can’t officially get money back if you turn back in your hard won boxes of bearings, but there’s always a loophole. You return your boxes and the staff are so happy you’ve given them back the balls that they present you a gift, like say, a teddy bear. You then take this gift to the attached shop next door where they suddenly take a liking to the teddy and value it at just about exactly the ball return cost (which is half the ball purchase cost). See ? No gambling at all.

Getting late now so goodnight from Tokyo.

Last minute update: NO INTERNET !!! If you are reading this it’s because I’ve managed to get someone to email if for me somehow, or it’s all over…..

Report 3

Hi all,

Well it looks like there is no internet here.

Like…NONE! Not even international phones. I have managed to ask one of the Japanese organisers to email these out when he has a chance. Apparently he can drive a few km to get to a place his mobile phone card works in his PC.

Therefore I have no way of knowing if these emails are getting out or not, but I’ll continue assuming they are. Sorry no pictures possible till later.

The area is hilly and green with heavy forests. We’re all in a small village nestled in a valley, or to be more accurate, two separate villages. We are spread out a bit with about 2 countries per traditional Japanese rooming house. We’re in for the full Japanese experience with meals on the floor, sleeping mats and bath houses.

Mark is a bit dubious about some of the seafood and sushi, but there’s enough other things to survive 🙂 The rest of us are loving the food. We are staying with the chinese team. Korea is next door. The Yanks, Russia and Thailand are up the road a bit, and Mongolia, Kazahkstan and Japan are in the other village a few km away.

It is now the morning before the receiver testing (rather hopefully called “training”) followed this afternoon by the Opening ceremony. Hopefully we’ll have no problems with the 80m frequency being so low (3.52Mhz) compared to our usual 3.58Mhz.

Shimmer Shimmer Shimmer (lots of hand waving and clock hands speeding round) Wobble Wobble Wobble

Now for those of you who have no interest in things to do with the event, it’s possibly a good idea to tune out for a few paragraphs ! If you’re really boring scan through to the last paragraph to see how we did.

It’s now just after the 80m competition on Wednesday.

Unusual to have 80m first, but this is just what they have decided to do. Not a great deal to say about yesterday. Mark had to modify his sniffer a bit and Bryan had to fix a broken one to use as the team spare today, but thats about it.

The opening ceremony was held in an auditorium after the obligigatory hour of team photos (a typical Asian experience). After a few speeches (in both Japanese and English, except for Mr Parkes in English) which take forever, we had some traditional dancers. Mr Arisaka (Japan) interestingly decided he didn’t need to give a yet another welcome speech (Yay for Mr Arisaka), but it was noticeable how much longer the Mayors speech went in Japanese compared to English :). Somehow methinks we weren’t hearing the same stuff.

Team Leader meeting last night was typical of these sorts of things:

Russia, Kazahkstan and Mongolia are a bit worried about how close to each other the two frequencies (fox and homing beacon) are and are concerned their older Russian made receivers won’t be able to cope too well, but the Japanese organisers explained that frequency allocations in the narrow 2m band in Japan are very strict.

No water at the transmitters today, so I decided to carry a water bottle taped to a belt. Damm, I should have put in that Camel pack afterall !

They asked people to not turn on receivers when they get off the bus at the start as they’d be doing transmitter tests at that time. After the problems in Mongolia 4 years ago with this I “suggested” they hold off transmitter testing till all receivers had been impounded, and after some discussion they decided to do that.

The map is not to IOF standard, and most significantly has not runnability grading ! Actually we found out today in actual practice that anywhere on the map in white was invariably “fight” or deep green.

The event start turned out to be in a sports hall next door to where we’d had the opening cermony yesterday, a few km from here at out lodgings. I’m happy I didn’t have to wait too long. It’s hard not to get nervous. Mark and I had early starts so that Adam and Bryan can start early on Friday as they have to zip off to the train station straight from the competition.

One amusing thing at the start was a young Chinese (M19) competitor who elected to not even take his map with him.

Apparently he couldn’t read them anyway (I wonder if his name was Jack?). I was trying to discourage him from talking to me at the start line, not because I was being unfriendly, but because I didn’t want to be disqualified for assisting or something similar.

So the course itself ?

Essential to stick to the roads/tracks otherwise have to clamber through jungle. I did decide to at one stage on the way to my first transmitter to brave the “white”

on the map as I got to a dead-end with only a long way back around. It was tough. Hard to know if it was worth it, especially as I was swearing at the vines stangling my legs and broad leaf shrubbery up to my head as I semi-tumbled down the side of a gully.

The course setter had put a lot of thought into making the transmitter order important. Miss the couple of transmitters down the bottom of the map on the way and you were in for a lot of back tracking. Myself I was lucky to pick up the lower one (my route there wasn’t perfect though…see above) on the way.

The other low down one I didn’t have to get for M40. I then ran nearly the entire height of the map to get the most distant transmitter next and filter down through the middle getting the last 2 on the way to the finish, which was in the middle of the map.

This turned out to be the optimum route. I only had to contend with the jungle once more, but that time was really unavoidable. I drank all my water so I was glad I’d taken it along.

Bryan did the same route as I but taking about 80mins (there are no results as yet…see below). I took around 93mins (the cost of that bush-bashing early on). Our course distances measure at about 12.1 and 12.8km respectively.

Interestingly we both went within about 40m of the transmitter we didn’t have to get, so the overall optimum length is possibly something like 10-11km.

Mark found 4 of his 5 tx, taking about 120 mins, 13.5km, being sure to be back on time. His initial course was excellent, but he didn’t pick up that way up top distant one next so it made it too messy to get the last transmitter. Adam did a rather strange order for all 5 taking 19.6km and 130mins. It illustrates how important transmitter order was on this competition and the importance of early bearings for decision making.

It’s hard to gauge how well we’ve done in the team category at this stage as there are so many variables there, but we have a reasonable chance of a team placing for M40. I’ll promise not to delete the above line later when I find out the real results 🙂

<More wobbling and shimmering> Oh, use your imagination !

Results are up ! (bit lax not having them at the event really)

M40 Gold overall: Bryan Ackerly 1:17

M40 Silver overall: Bruce Paterson 1:32

(and 30mins onto the Bronze competitor from China)

M21 Silver Region 3: Adam Scammell 2:11 (5 TX)

M21 Bronze Region 3: Mark Diggins 2:01 (4 TX) Gold was taken by a Mongolian competitor, and above that two Kazahkstan competitors who don’t count to Region 3. Notably 2nd overall was Nikolay Tarrasov who was profiled in AO. He admitted to having an awful run, mucking up the order badly.

Of course in M40 we will also get the Region 3 team gold, but the surprise news is also gold team result for M21 since the 2nd Mongolian was well down the list and also had 4TX, so the addition of their two times was less than Adam and Marks.

Anyway great news for the Aussie team.

I’ll deliver this via flash stick to Mr Hirochi now…..

Report 4

Hi again everyone,

Managed to get onto the net last night at another lodging hotel, but thats likely to be a one-off, so these will continue to be communications out of the great beyond.

Well we were more than a little surprised at the results for yesterday. What happened to the Japan home town advantage. It is also worth noting that both Bryan’s and my times were faster than the quickest M21 times even though we were doing M40. Ok we didn’t need to go actually into #5, but we both went so close to it, it would have been a few minutes at most.

Our Japanese host, Yoshimoro, who was a competitor at Ballarat but is on staff here, gave us a couple of bottles of Saki (rice wine) to celebrate.

Have a look at https://ardf.org.au and follow the International links to the Japan R3 championships site to get to the results. An article will appear after the champs at the JARL website http://www.jarl.or.jp

Today turned out to be an amusing tour day, but probably not for the best of reasons. The plan was to spend 4 hours in Niigata city (doing shopping, lunch etc, whatever you want), a couple of hours at a Theme park (?) and a barbeque dinner.

What it turned out to be was a few hours of mutual confusion as our young student guides tried to cope with 4 Aussies and 2 Yanks who all had this tendency to not strictly follow the herd. Things started to get better at the theme park, however.

The theme park to out to be a geriatric, somewhat rusting and dilapidated fun park which appeared to groan into oily activity at our arrival. We’d been given a book of tokens each to go on whatever rides we wanted.

Our hapless guide kept trying to enthusiatically guide us towards the ferris wheel and other such exciting activities. The theme of rusting machinery and cracked paintwork though a bit sad, started to became funny as we started to find how pissweak the rides were. The devastation of our young guide, (1st year University English student), when we expressed such disappointment that the rusted hulk of a chairlift (well past Arthurs Seat state) was broken was comical. When Mark pretended to start to back a dogem car out of a shed, ostensibly to ride it down the hill on a concrete drain, he became very alarmed. How was he to cope with these impossible Australians.

After that we really started to get into the swing of “pisstopia” world. Harley and Mark even went on a ride on the exteremely lazy ferris wheel. After waiting for their return we weren’t even able to use up our tickets as all the rides closed down, but we didn’t mind much. It’d been fun.

The barbeque with free Sapporo beer was great. Each table had a small burner with thinly sliced meat and vegetables.

A bit like the Australian version of a Mongolian BBQ. Lots of photos again, and unfortunately (but inevitabably) Kareoke. Still, free grog always helps 🙂

Just before Adam let off his fireworks from a 100Yen shop (ok, he was a bit drunk tonight).

I’m now in the team leaders meeting. Always a good time to update a report.

Everything will be much the same as yesterday for tommorrows competition, but there will be water at the controls !

Every morning at 6am we are woken by the large bell (which sounds like a gong) from the temple at the end of our street. Quite why it is struck 9 times none seems to be able to tell us !

Anyway it sounded the start to what turned out to be a really tough day. They made up for the lack of hills on the first competition by adding extra ones for this 2m competition.

Start was in a basketball court not far from Pissweak World we visited yesterday, and in fact the finish ended up near a little railway that runs around the theme park right in the middle of the map.

We fully expected to not do as well today as we knew the Japanese mainly practice on 2m (VHF), and it’s a harder band to ‘hunt’ on, especially in hilly terrain.

For me things started off very well, finding my first TX in just over 10 minutes, and even better I was up in the middle of the map after 1/2 hour, with only two TXs to get off to my right, and one above the finish to the left.

Unfortunately I chose the one road too early to head towards my 2nd one (I’d already passed the one I didn’t have to get off to my right). Rather than go all the way back down the hill to the main road again, I elected to bush-bash across a small bit of white to get to the right road…. BAD IDEA !!! I should have learnt from yesterday, but this was worse…far worse !

Half an hour later, sore, hot, and tangled in vines after climbing a cliff only possible in orienteering shoes I made it to *a* road, but which one I wasn’t too sure. I had to do quite a bit of weaving in the jungle just to get through.

It didn’t take me too long to recover and find TX 2, but I still wasn’t sure where I was. The roads kept refusing to fit and somehow I finally relocated myself right up the top of the map. How I actually got there I’ll never know, but since I now knew where I was I figured I’d better get that one above the start now (not my original plan) before getting the one on the far right. I did this pretty well. Then the slog across the top of the map turned out to be uphill, forever…..

Finally got to the peak and had 2 drinks before the return to the finish. It was a long way, and I had to run the entire distance, mostly on tarmac with O-shoes. Ouch ! Anyway, it took a while and I was completely soaked, but made it with 4 minutes to spare before my time limit. If only I’d gone one intersection furthur ages before and I’d have probably done the whole thing in 90 mins.

Bryan couldn’t find the one above the finish, and neither could Mark. Adam found all 5 in just under 2 hours.

So not as impressive a performance today, but we’ll still get some medals:

M21

1 Nikolay Tarrasov, Kazahkstan, 1:16 (remember not in Region 3)

2 Adam Scammell, Australia, 1:58 (1st R3, 2nd outright)

8 Mark Diggins, Australia, 2:08, 3TX (Also 5th R3)

They will still get Gold for the R3 team as the other teams partners let the winners down.

M40

1 K.Makita, Japan, 1:50

5 Brucer Paterson, 2:16

7 Bryan Ackerly, 2:09

Unfortunately we just miss out on Silver R3 team (by 1 minute !), so we get Bronze.

As for those Yankee dudes in M60 ?

Quiet Bob is happy with his Gold medal today, being the only M60 who found all required 3 TX’s in both competitions.

Harley came last in M60, skipping one Tx (got 2), but he did make an attempt at the 3rd putting his time after the others who skipped it straight away. They still got a team Silver.

Got to go now ! The girl at the other Hotel has allowed me to post this from her internet tonight.

Report 5

Hey Everyone,

I’m in a Hotel in Tokoyo, it’s morning, and since Douglas took us out drinking last night….. well you know how it feels 🙂

The Banquet and closing ceremony went well after the 80m competion, but it felt a little strange for Mark and I having to accept medals on Bryan and Adam’s behalf, as well as our own ! Each of us ended up with about 6 medals each, once you take into account both Region 3 and overall for both individual and team results. Started to get a bit heavy around the neck, and you’d jangle as you walked 🙂 The ceremony went for ages due to all the categories (you may recall at our Ballarat Region 3 champs we didn’t give team results for “friendship” or what Japan calls Open (not to be confused with M21) which cut it down a bit.

Anyway, best to take advantage of the free internet before we checkout so I’ve uploaded some pictures. It’s only for the first part of the trip so far since that’s all I’ve resized !

Mark heads home this afternoon and I head of to Kyoto.

Report 6

Hi,

Well this will probably be the last bulletin from overseas (this time!).

Since that’s the case I’d better mention a fwe bits and pieces I’ve forgotten along the way. After that Kyoto (for those interested).

I’m on a free internet connection, courtesy of an ignorant Japanese who has left their wireless network unencrypted ! Works ok from the Hotel, but down to 1Mbps as it’s a bit weak here.

Courses Revisted:

On the bullet train back from Niigata, Mark and I measured our 2m (VHF) course distances (approximately). Mark did nearly exactly the same distance he did on the 80m competition (13.2km) for his 3 Transmitters (if he’d found #4 it would have been slightly less, but missing the distant #3 cuts down the km a lot).

I did just under 17km for my required 4 transmitters. No wonder I had only 4 minutes spare at the end ! I also measured what I considered to be a do-able optimum route (sticking to tracks mainly), and it was about 12km. That’s a touch long for a region 3 event and reflects the longer course times we’ve seen.

I guess the fact you have to use roads does lengthen the straight line distance considerably, more so than in a typical Australian setting.

Arto, from Finland, also wanted to mention that Bayside is well represented in Finland, and you will also see his picture in my Niigata album.

Next Comptition:

Well this is a complicated one. Lets take the 2008 World ARDF Championships first. Region 3 (asia pacific +) has been nominally allocated the 2008 World Champs, but withing Region 3 we have to work out who, and it has to happen within about a week from now.

China has requested to run it as it coincides with the Beijing Olympics, but wasn’t certain at the champsionships if they could. [Update: China says no]

Korea has also said they might be able to run them. We (Australia/WIA) have said we will run them if noone else can, to make sure they stay in Region 3.

Now taking Region 3 Champs 2007.

Korea has also said if China (or Australia) end up running World Champs 2008) then they at least want to run Region 3 champs. Also Mongolia have put up their hand again, as has new possibility Vladivostok (Eastern Russia). I’m not entirely sure the East Russian are actually in ARDF R3 yet (they have been trying), so maybe this is another way of asking ?

Kyoto:

Now this bit is just me, so not really anything to do with the Aussie team any more, but included here if you’re interested.

Firstly, the cheap Hotel Douglas found me is great. All I need, and relatively big by Japanese standards. The bathroom is in a cupboard, but that’s to be expected. And the free (by accident) internet is a bonus. Email is the way to contact me now (but I have to check out tommorrow morning).

I visted Nijo Castle this morning since it’s across the road. The Shogun sure had a lot of meeting rooms ! The interesting things for me were just how massive all the timbers in the construction are, and of course the Nightingale floors that squeak to alert of an assassin. Would drive you insane in the meantime though ! I tried to see how they worked but alas couldn’t get to see under.

Since it worked so well in Prague a while back, I decided to hire a bike to tour around. This worked really well. I started to get Temple overload after a while, so I hiked up a hill behind the Kiyomizu Temple. There were little shrines all the way up, making me suspect this was a path to enlightenment or some such. It was a bit of a dissappointment to pop out at a paved road at the top then 🙂 The narrow cobbled streets near the slopes are fascinating, full of little shops selling gifts at ridiculous prices.

Kyoto Central station was where I ended up for lunch, and I couldn’t resist the yummy buns of many types in a French Pattiserie Cafe in the basement.

Later as I tired of temples, and even the ornamental gardens, I found a bike track beside the river and headed North for a decent ride.

This turned out to be a little microcosm of Kyoto life. The rear of the resturants that are on Pontocho Dori (a famous lane), the people riding, walking, practising instruments (guitar, trumpets, recorder, flutes…) and the some Japanese style BBQs where they bring a little portable griller to cook thinly sliced meat and veges.

Had to return the bike by 7pm, but afterwards went to a Kyoto Kitchen Resturant not far from here (just walked in hoping they had an English menu). Yes they did !

Tommorow afternoon I’m back on the bullet to Tokyo and Narita, so only the morning to do some more exploring.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the reports, and stay tuned for next year, Bulgaria World Championships.

Cheers,

Bruce

PS: If you liked the reports or wish to make a suggestion, I’d appreciate if you could send me an email. I’ts good to know who is reading them !

World ARDF 2002 Part 6

Vinohrady, Praha


Well, the title is the name of the district in Prague (Praha) where this hotel is located. It’s not a bad place, pretty basic, and based on some quick checks I’ve done on other Hotels today, pretty damm cheap too by central Prague standards.

It is Monday evening now. It’s still warm, but the window is open and it’s quite pleasant with the soft ‘going to bed’ noises in the surrounding buildings. It’s been a busy day, but first lets rewind a bit to Slovakia.

Instead of going more into the results of the 80m ARDF competition, I’ll refer you to http://www.ardf-r1.org (I think… I haven’t checked that address) where Rainer will be putting up all the results and splits from the German ARDF software. I haven’t seen the splits yet so that will be interesting !! (I really want to know how I compare on some of my better legs).

After the prize giving ceremony, which was similar to the 2m one, but inside in the basketball court due to inclement weather (now doesn’t that sound familier fellow ARDF-2003 organisers ?!!), it was straight into the HamFest.

Oh man was there a lot of food there !! After already feeding us a light meal beforehand I don’t know what they were expecting, but I can’t imagine anyone could possibly have gone away hungry. The gift swapping was much more muted than in Region 3 championships. I suspect it’s just a cultural thing. There was certainly a fair bit of it, but rather than feeling inadequate like we did the that first time at Townsville, I had some stuff left over !

Remember the Slovenian junior who had followed me to TX1 earlier in the day ? Many of the receivers couldn’t hear with the hopelessly weak signal from the defective transmitter…which incidentally affected all competitors so that’s why they left it as is rather than turning on the backup. Note to ourselves: [Must check power level of TXs after turned on in the field in International Competitions we run].

Anyway, his name was Ziga, and he ended up coming 10th in the M19 category, his best ever performance. Not that this helps my own result at all of course, but it is kinda nice to know I’m worth following (at least some of the time). That’s one of the splits I’d really like to see (4-1). He gave me a bottle of Slovenian wine from his home town since he was pretty excited at his result and grateful for my (sort-of) help.

Having been to some big (well Easter 3 Days anyway) orienteering competitons, and world ARDF competitions this sort of intermingling of competitors and making friends is something that is quite different, at least in degree. With ARDF the whole group are together for the 5 days of the carnival, not just the few hours of competition, partly due to the way it is structured, and also since it is held is some pretty obscure locations where making your own arrangements from afar would be almost impossible. Dave, one of the US competitors, came along just as almost a side trip to some rock climbing he is heading to in the Dolomites in Italy. He says he had so much fun at this world championship he is hooked…. “When’s the next one ??”

During the gift exchange I gave one of the German competitors a special gift. She nearly fell over laughing when I presented her, with great ceremony, with a green capsicum (pepper). This was in reference to the green capsicum that was mysteriously suspended from the roof of one of the lifts during the German celebrations after the 2m event.



Larry, Adam & Bryan under the Luge


The Summer Luge


Mountain Railway

Most of the Yanks were due to head off early the next morning, many back to Hungary with Ghuri. Larry remained for a bit and the next day we were going to head up the cable car with him. Unfortunately I discovered I had to go into Poprad with one of the organisers to organise our train tickets for that night otherwise we probably wouldn’t get them at all. Adam and Bryan had to travel that night to get back in time for their train (didn’t really worry me since I have the whole week). The mountain had clouded in (again) by the time I had all that organised, so instead we ended up going up a cable railway on a nearby peak. Interesting ride, and a good walk up the top. A fluke we ran into Sergei on our walk (who wasn’t competing in this championship, since he didn’t make the Ukraine team…and he was the one who won the USA champs last year) who was on the last day of his visa. He rode by bike to the championships from Ukraine to save money since as an observer he gets no government sponsorship.



Cable Train (Funicular)


Ski run


The Tatra Peaks

Afterwards Larry and us took the train(s) to Poprad. Larry is staying there a few days. We found a great (and cheap) restuarant in the pedestrian mall there, before heading back to Poprad station to board our sleeper.



Caught Out !


The Prague Sleeper


Relaxed Lunch

The sleeper was pretty nice with only 3 pretty generous beds (for a train) in a cabin. Of course we had to be woken rudely for the passport checks, but unlike Mongolia at least they did these whilst the train was on the move. We were also stopped for a while with lots of compressed air noises, so it’s possible the rail gauge changed here too, but the stuffing around factor seemed considerably less than in China/Mongolia. Other than waking whenever we hit a station (odd sort of express that seemed to make lots of stops) it wasn’t a bad night.

Took a while to get ourselves organised in Prague. We didn’t have a prior booking at all and it took a bit to get oriented. I went and bought a map that has already become a valuable if somewhat dog-eared possession.

After finding a Hotel (that has turned out to be pretty cheap compared to many others, and quite acceptable) we lugged our luggage up the stairs (no lift) and settled in. Bit a a walk around the area was planned before lunch, but we didn’t end up returning till evening.

I now have the tram system pretty well worked out. The metro undergound is out of action due to the floods except for one line. I’m told it’ll probably be that way for 6 months to a year since the whole system and stations were completely flooded. There a few extra trams called XA and XB that attempt to follow the missing underground loops.

I won’t go into too much detail about the city, but we did of course visit the Karluv bridge, and a quick walk through the Prague castle (the centre of Czech goverment). Prague has many streets and lanes heading in odd directions. Apparently this is partly intentional so invaders would get lost !



Prague


Canal


Flood Damage

The damage due to the recent floods (they flooded the West bank particularly about 3m or so up on the buildings) is extensive, but repairs are well underway. Workmen with cement dusty overalls are everywhere in the river district, and there is a damp musky wet cement smell in places. Lower floor windows often burst due to the flowing water pressure. Thought this means we might not get to see everything, it does work in our favour too since the crowds are apparently *well* down. Still, you can tell you’re in a tourist mecca when you hear English and German more often than Czech.



The Karlov Bridge


Starom Square


Narrow Lane

Took the trams back to our Hotel to get ready for a concert we’d booked for on the spur of the moment.

It turned out to be a quartet in the Municipal House whereas I had more a full symphony orchestra in mind (Gerswin, Bernstein, Bizet etc. usually are). Still, after the initial surprise (in retrospect the tickets did seem fairly cheap), it turned out to be quite interesting, especially when they had to improvise to fill in extra parts.

A more Italian style pizza (yum) on the way home. On the way home just turned out to be a bit longer for Adam and myself since Adam wanted to take some night shots of the city from the castle (this was not a trivial walk!). Some sections and roads in the city are taped off. This is either due to danger of collapse (sometimes the flooded cellars get some structural damage and you get sudden sink-holes), or a lack of power in that area making it dangerous. In places there are big portable generator sets humming away to provide power for that area. Even so, a couple of the streets we went down were alarmingly dark! Finally got back after midnight (with rather too many time exposure photos of city buildings).

Prague on (mostly) 2 Wheels


Today I was set to meet Maurice from the Belgium team as he was passing though Prague. I was at the appointed place and time so something must have stuffed up. Anyway, instead I checked out bike rentals and an internet cafe. I did end up hiring a bike, which included a 2 hour tour of the city. Ideal way to get around, and much more fun. I mananged to talk min into giving me an extra 2 hours of rental for the same price, so basically I had the mountain bike for the rest of the day.

The bike tour was good. I was just me, a couple of Londoners and the guide, plus a trainee guide tagging along. Probably a bit shorter on details that your typical tour but that didn’t worry me too much at all. A few titbits: Nick Cave lived in Prague for a short while. He wrote a song about a cafe here called the “Thirsty Dog”. That cafe now has a signed Nick Cave portrait 🙂



On the Bike Tour


Starom Square


More Flood Damage

Micheal Jackson had a tour here a whike back. He donated a huge blow up statue of, you guessed it, Micheal Jackson. It stayed on the hill to the North of the city for some years before it was “decommissioned”. They floated it up and down the river a few times as a boat. In it’s place they built a giant metronome. Yep…looks just like that metronome your Granny used to have on the piano. It’s meant to symbolise the continueous passing of time since it always ticks…..uh…except at the moment when it’s not due to power problem due to the flood.

Mozart performed Don Giovanni here for first time in 17?? something. It’s been playing in Prague ever since…uh…except for now when it isn’t and something else is instead.

There is a graffitti wall called the John Lennon wall. They paint it clean every year and immediately it is filled again. The first time someone had painted a portrait of John Lennon, which didn’t sit terribly well with the at the time communist regime. Later, when Czechoslovakia regained a democratic system, someone remembered the John Lennon had been painted over and re-found it.

Hmmmmm a noisy group have just arrived downstairs at the Hotel, so though it is late I may as well keep going…..

One of the girls keeps trying to say shhhhhh but I suspect it’s a hopeless cause 🙂 Of course I can’t understand a word they are saying/yelling.

Afterwards I took the bike to the park across the river to the North of town, took some photos of the city, and gave the bike a bit more of a workout than it would probably normally get riding up and down steps. (Hey, the tracks were marked with a bike symbol, and I was just following the locals :-)). Due to the wide paved areas in this park it seems to be a very popular in-line skating, biking and skate boarding area. A mountain bike is essential in Prague due to the cobbled streets. A road bike would be a disaster.

I rode up to the castle (again) but could not ride in since it’s only for pedestrians. Oh well, around the castle, and back through the river district and a complicated route back through the city (ok, my technique was to ride for a while anywhere it looked interesting, and then try to find myself on the map again…which wasn’t easy with this map!).

Radio Free Europe broadcasts from the centre of Prague from a big building. One of the most powerful HF transmitters in the world apparently. The building now is fortified and no visitors are allowed (since September 11). After returning the bike (damm what a pity…that beat walking) I did a bit of shopping (gasp horror…Bruce doing shopping).

Tommorow the Technical Museum, and possibly a Jazz Club dinner. Later in the week I’ll probably move onto Rock 🙂

Hmmmm that was a long one !

PS: Jodi, still no O’Henry Bars in Czech Repulic either, but I do have something else instead……

On the Jazz Train


I’m just back from a dinner Jazz night at a Jazz and Blues place recommended by the bike people. I wonder how this will come out after a few Czech beers. Well the beer was certainly cheap, and the Mexican style food excellent (and filling)…… but the jazz ? Well it was what I’d call country music (bleah), not one of my favorites. Maybe given a stretch you could call it Bluesgrass, and hence a tenuous connection to Blues, but only just. I was most disappointed.

According to an English couple I chatted to over dinner, a Jazz band is back playing at the bridge…they weren’t there when we went over the other day. It rained on me on the way home too (actually I would have made it back ok if I hadn’t got my tram stops confused….. it’s so much harder at night to tell where on earth you are in an only slight;y familier city). Oh well 🙂

It’s a relief to use a normal keyboard again. You have no idea how hard it is to use a European keyboard in the internet cafes. The Y and Z are swapped over, the numbers have to be shifted, and I still have no idea how to get to the 3rd and 4th characters on the keys (which include semi important things like : and !… bit hard to do a URL without an : I’m reduced to finding an old shortcut and changing it !

As for the rest of the day:

It was a bit of a slow start, partly because of a late night last night (recall those noisy ppl who arrived ?), and also because it’s a holiday, dammit, and it’s been up early nearly every morning (well Bruce’s definition of early anyway) for weeks.

I sent off the last report from an internet cafe just up then street. Pretty convenient really since this Hotel is in a bit of an out-of-the-way place.

Took the tram to the Technical Museum. Turns out it was just behind the park where I went cycling yesterday, but then things move much faster on a bike. I have to admit the museum was a bit of a disappointment… not at all like the visit to the one in US a few years back. I finally found the place by guesswork and a bit of map help…the 1:16000 tourist map is a bit of a beast to read at times; pictures of monuments and churches tend to obsure important steet junctions ! The museum would be excellent if you’re a steam train buff; and yes Roger, I took some photos for you. Otherwise the displays well, were a bit dull. The technical displays stop before surface mount chips, English only appears on about 30% of exhibits, and despite the pure volume of things in a particular category (say cameras), it was interesting but not fascinating. I think more thought needs to be put into the presentation of material. There are only so many box brownies I can look at before I yawn. The number of staff out-numbered the number of customers 2:1.1



Technical Museum


Steam Trains


Now why didn’t this Tandem design take off ?

The industial design exhibit was, erhem, well thought it was some sort of joke to be honest. Some vacuum cleaner company presented all it’s failed designs and called it an exhibit. Lots of curvy plastic and zero content.

There was a good school-level introduction to resonance and modulation of waveforms, and as well as the full actual steam locomotives and early cars, a whole room dedicated to steam train art (pretty strange for a technical museum).

Possibly I’m bagging it a bot much, or maybe I’m spoilt when it comes to sciece museums. It’s only 70 Kc (about A$5) so make up your own mind 🙂



A threatened species


New model analogue sniffer for Marvin

Afterwards having a bit more time than expected I walked back through the park (letenske sady) and visited the castle (properly this time). I bought one of the tickets simply to climb the cathedral steeple, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Don’t bother buying a guided tour or anything… just lob past a tour group when you need to find out about something. It that doesn’t happeb to be in English, try another ! There’s enough of them. That way you can speed past the less interesting bits, such as the old palace. The view from the steeple was good. Worth it for that alone.



Prague Castle


Castle Cathedral


Riegrovy Gardens

Another interesting bit is where they have lots of little shops that were built into the original wall. There is an extensive display of body armour (that stuff must have been so uncomfortable!) in a room upstairs within the wall itself.

I went walking through Stare Mesto, the old town, after that. I wanted to check out the big square where there had been anti-communist student protests. It’s well just a big square (well actually a long rectangle).

Here’s another titbit: The Jewish part of town is one of the most well preserved Jewish quarters in the world…the reason being Hitler declared it off limits for German bombing in WW2…Why ? Why would *Hitler* do that ? Well apparently he wanted a monument to an completely exterminated race…and the one in Prague was to be it. Now that’s wierdness.

I also had a look at a room in Pension Unistas Cloister Inn. The rooms according the Lonely Planet Guide are originally jail cells. Well they did look pretty basic, but comfortable. A kilometre of corridor to walk down to get to them, and shared WC/showers, more little more expensive and harder to get to the airport… so I won’t bother moving. Interesting to see though.

I have to tell you this tourism stuff is hard work !! I’m footsore. Probably I tend to move a bit faster than most, and think nothing of walking across town. Oh yeah, I tried to track down a Northern Hemisphere compass for you, Bryan, but the trail went cold when I was referred to a shop that referred me to a shop that didn’t seem to be there. Probably faulty directions.



Prague

Oooh the noisy ppl are back . Oh well 🙂

The Rock of Stvanice


This’ll probably be my last report. [Many sighs of relief I hear that there won’t be yet more stuff filling up the mailbox]. Now, hands up who has read all of every report ??

Well if yesterday was a day of a few disappointments, today exceeded expectations !

After sending off yesterdays report at the local internet cafe I had some time left to do some research. Yay I found an orienteering shop…via, would you believe, the Rogaining World Champs web page, so nice and recent too. They had an email address so I asked if they had the Russian compass. As it turns out, I got to the place just after they’d sent the reply… and yes they did ! Sometimes the trams didn’t turn the way I expected, but that didn’t matter, just swap sides at the next stop 🙂 It’s cheap travel too… about A60c for 15 minute ticket and A90c for an hour ticket. Easy.

It was a funny little place where you duck down low into a doorway. Possibly it wasn’t the usual entrance since the building had some flood damage being near the river. I bought a plate compass fro Bryan pretty much the same as the one I bought in Germany last year. Also got a spare blank Russian plate so I can mount a plate permanently to each sniffer, and a thumb compass blank (for fox-oring in Northern Hemisphere in the future ?). There were also a nice range of O shoes, and since I’d thrown my old ones in the bin after the last event (they were surviving on gaffer tape) and I bought some 1999 “model” ones for a fair bit cheaper.

Next stop was a particular ticket office on Vaclavske (Wencelas I think) Square to see if there were any rock concerts at the this… nothing of interest this week, but some good things coming up in November (how useful to know). Then a bit of a walk in the sun (it had started off overcast and a bit dampish) to an obsure part of town (definitely not tourist trampled zone here) to check out a bike shop mentioned in lonely planet. It had disappeared, but it was a nice walk back through a big park I hadn’t yet discovered.

Some more internet research and I found a new list of bike hire shops (one of my possible plans for tommorow), and, by a bit of a fluke found out about an outdoor rock event…today !!

Looked ideal… outdoors so I could mostly avoid the heavy Czech smokers, a benefit concert to raise money for the “Roxy”, a venue that has had to close temporarily as it was completely flooded out (over 6m). It was all afternoon and evening, but from experience I knew the best is kept till later so I only headed to Stvanice Island SK8 park about 6pm. Luckily only a 20 min walk from the Hotel (I didn’t have a clear idea from the map how to even get ONTO the island, but it turned out to be quite easy).

All the ingredients were there…about 4000 people, lots of portaloos, hot corn cobs, and even Hare-Khristna vege-burgers. The only thing is I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, except for some of the songs that were in dodgy english. Didn’t matter much though.

No ID age checks, no wet/dry areas, no convoluted “double” mosh gating (hardly required with such a small event), but quite a few more cigarettes. There we 2 stages though, one for live bands and the other for DJs.

The first band I saw was a sort of electronic groove band.. not bad but a bit boring. The next one was a surprise…. trombone, trumpet, guitars… yep a ska band. They were good too. A lot closer to Jazz than last nights “country” at a Jazz bar!

The vege burgers turned out to be excellent on that yummy moist bread. The corn was, well corn.

The next band was popular, but since it was hip-hop entirely in Czech it had little appeal to me.

To make up for the healthiness of the previous courses I had a evil deep fried thingy with lemon and cheese on top. Reminded me a bit of those beaver tail doovers at Whistler. Also bought a T-shirt since it was getting cold. The final band are hard to describe. Sort of a mix between Enigma and Chemical Brothers with MachineGunFellacio’s taste in night-shirt dress. Bongo drums too. Very strange, but I liked them a lot.

On the way home for some reason a street didn’t go where I expected and I ended up on a railway siding. Hmmmmm not good. I wasn’t keen on back tracking due to some dubious characters I passed quickly in one of those “generator” power zones. I followed the railway line since it basically went the way I wanted. After winding through some stationary trains and past a few workshop buildings I saw the street I wanted to be on… below me. Dammm. Past some more derelict buildings (this was getting spooky) and then there was merely a fence between me and the road. Oooops… policemen guarding one of the many flood no-go zones right outside the fence. Bugger ! I didn’t fancy attempting to explain in sign language exactly why I was climbing out of a high security area at 11pm or so. I had no ID on me (I’m not going to take anything even vaguely valuable like a passport to a rock concert now am I ?). I had this nasty suspicion that my explanations would be met with some incredulity, or misunderstanding.

So lurk back into the buildings. OK…I’ll just walk along kind of parallel to the road and hope something better turns up. More derelict buildings. A few locomotives, an unscalable concrete cliff up to the road now. Ahhhhhh a carpark, with other people in it. I walked like I was entirely where I was meant to be, out a walkway and out the gate. Quick turn left and all was well…. Phew ! Exactly what the people in the carpark thought I was meant to to be doing stumbing about the railway lines I have no idea, and I don’t care.

The noisy people turn out to be a school group from Denmark, but it’s possible they were only last nights noisy group and the night before had been a different noisy group.

Well that about wraps it up. Be back in Oz on Saturday, but I doubt in a useful state. If I make it to the MTB-O on Sunday it will be a miracle !



I made it to the Chiltern MTBO !

PS: I did !!

World ARDF 2002 Part 5

The Last Supper


Today was another biggie… The 2nd and final competiton for the World Championships: The HF (80m) competition.

We had an even earlier start than the first competition (6:30am bus departure) since it was furthur away, and there was a 1lm or so walk into the start/holding area from where the buses could get to. I had an 11:45am start, and we arrived there about 7:45am. Groan !! Again Bryan had the first start in our Aussie team in the 6th group (1st start was again at 9am). Adam was in the middle with 10:10am, and I was last. Not a whole lot could be seen from the start area, but occasionally we did glimpse just a few up in a clearing on a hill. Turns out this wasn’t useful information (I think they must have been pretty lost!).



Start compound for 80m (similar)


My map and (approx) course


Nice Clouds

My event:

There was a thunderstorm that was threatening to break every now and then, but luckily it didn’t till the last competitor had finished. This time I was organised enough to start my stopwatch 1 hour before my start time. This means it rolls over just as I start, and is one less thing to forget at the start line. I could just hear the orienteering beeper at the start to synchronise my watch to.

There were two start corridors as before to split up the competitors somewhat. Ours (M21) headed right up a steep hill, and the damm thing seemed to go forever. Must have been 300m long or something (or at least it seemed like it). Normally I get to the end of the corridor before TX1 has finished its cycle, but today I had to remember 2 bearings as TX3 was just on as I reached the top ! These bearings all turned out to be roughly right. I chose to take #2 to the left as it was away from the finish and seemed strongest. #3 was directly towards the finish circle and the others spread in between.

As I continued up the hill towards #2 (what a hill !!) I got a bearing for #1 that was radically different and pointed back towards the edge of the start circle. Either one of other of my #1 bearings was significantly off, or there was something terribly wrong with TX1 as it was a very weak signal. I carried on to TX2. Bad decision. My bearings were right and the trasnmitter was faulty… still hard to know that in advance.

One problem with the sniffer I was using (apologies Ian) is there is almost no feedback as to how far you are from the tranmitter since it’s just a knob you turn. I kept on thinking #2 was closer than it was and plumbing for the bush-bashing bit WAY too early. I did a lot of bush bashing on the way to #2!! Very slow. Every time it came on it was still furthur. This was taking forever ! I eventually found the bastard 50 minutes into my event. Awful !

Luckily I passed a road creek combination on the map that was unique just before #2, and I was relocated (phew!). I took a good route to #5, but unfortunately either my navigation or the map was wrong and the track petered out unexpectedly. Despite some mucking about trying to find it again I reverted to bush-bashing, but this time avoiding the worst of it.

When #5 came on again I had gone past, so I heading back and got it when it was off (one of the advantages of starting late is earlier competitors often leave a path through the bush near the transmitters…not always reliable though). Next was #4 which I sprinted to. This was getting better. Not enough to recover from my earlier slow start, but at least I had an outside chance of finding all of them now…just.

Said a quiet hi to Karla at #4 and headed back around a lake and up a steep hill to head right back to the start to get #1 (the faultly one). Almost all competitors had similar problems with #1, so I wasn’t alone here. One Slovenian boy could never hear #1 at all since it was so weak (our receivers are more sensitive than most it would seem) and he followed me the entire way to #1. I did that one really well as it happens. I only had an hour left from #4 out of the 150 minute time limit, so I was glad things were going well now. I was determined to get all 5 transmitters. Off now to #3 which I had many bearings for now basically towards the finish. I sprinted towards the finish and when #3 came on did an immediate right angle (in fact even back a bit) and again found it when it was off. That was 4 out of 5 TXs I found when they weren’t transmitting!

All I had to do now was plummet towards the downhill finish (thank god it was downhill). I made it in 136 minutes for 35th place (same as the 2m competition…) I was kinda hoping I would do better, but the weak TX1 and my bad route to TX2 put paid to that. At least I made a good recovery.



Finishers for 80m Event

I again beat Csaba with 149:10…cutting it fine!! Ghuri took just under the time limit for his 4 TXs himself since he had knee troubles.

Adam had took 131 minutes (so close!) for 33rd place. Bryan took 138 minutes with 3 TXs for position 45.

Saw Stephan back at the hotel looking very depressed. He had broken his headphone wire on the way to his 1st trasnmitter, and then broken his spare headphone wire on the way to his 2nd ! I take a spare set on 80m since I don’t have the FM radio link like I do for 2m. I hate having a wire between me and the sniffer, so my next 80m sniffer will have the FM link as well for sure !

We have had a light meal already. Later there is the prize giving ceremony (no prizes for the Aussie team I’m afraid. Our team placing is 12th. Not bad considering what we’re up against, and a lot better than some other countries with bigger teams, but not quite placing material at a World Championship. Region 3 championships are a different matter !).

There are 323 competitors at this competition, the biggest I’ve ever been to for ARDF, and quite possibly the biggest ever. Not in the league of say a World Orienteering event with 2000 competitors, but this is a bit different.



80m Prize Ceremony


SportIdent at the finish

After the Prize giving is a “HamFest”. This isn’t what you might think (that is, unless you read my report from the German Championships last year). I suspect it’s a booze up and gift swapping ceremony (this is a must for World Events… you have to take with you little gifts to swap).

Anyway, not sure if I’ll have internet access after this or not. Possibly at some stage. The plan is to take the cable car up the mountain outside our window tommorow morning, maybe try to get the the castle the US team got to yesterday (but we don’t know how yet…), and then get on sleeper train to Prague overnight tommorow night. The constraint is Adam and Bryan have to be back to Prague for their flight back, otherwise I might have taken a day train.

World ARDF 2002 Part 4

Opening Day


I’m in the ARDF Team Leaders first meeting. Since these tend to be fairly lengthy affairs, especially due to 2 or more languages, I have the laptop here to write a report in the slow bits.

Yesterday we drove from Orfu, via Budapest all the way to Tatranske Matilare in northern Slovakia. We fitted into one van and two cars. At one point Gyrui got a phone call about 2 compass left at the house, but no-one seems to have claimed them.

Not lot to say about the journey really. The border crossing was slow but uneventful. As we approached Poprad the roads got windier and more interesting. As we wound our way to Tatranske Matilare I could follow the path of a narrow gauge mountain railway which services all the resort towns around here. It was even electrified (saw the train leaving one of the towns and it looked to be a two carriage forwards-backwards affair).



Map of the Tatras


Hotel Hutnik, Tatra Mountains, ARDF Practice


Team Leaders Meeting

Arrived at the hotel and it wasn’t really clear what we were meant to do (there was no registration desk in evidence). After a bit of waiting about we went into the ARDF admin office and found out thats what we were meant to do.

Met many old friends from many countries. It was while we were having a post-dinner drink with Mauris from Belgium that the bombshell dropped…. we had left the two large tube containing out 2m antennas back in Hungary.

Oh s^%$^%$t !

Panic !

It was going to cost a packet to get them couriered up, and they would probably not arrive in time anyway. After much questioning we have located some spare beams from the US team. Phew ! I had to re-solder the spare one I borrowed from Dick last night, but it seems to have gone together ok. I will try it out today at the practice event after this meeting.

They are just demonstrationing the Sport Ident setup to be used. No manual punch backup, but they do have two SI controls at each transmitter (and of course the officials required at an Interntional event) for backup. They are using the German ARDF software (It was Stefan doing the demonstration). Looks like it also does ARDF start lists and other useful things like that. Another interesting statement in the brochure is “support for quick registration of competitors”.

…. – that means time has passed !

OK Relief…the antenna seems to work ok. Thanks Dick !! Adam has borrowed a similar tape measure construction from Bob, and Bryan has modified a large 5 element 2m beam from Larry (a US competitor who has come to the championships directly) to 3 elements. The practice area was on/near a little ski run just outside the hotel with a baby poma. The real ski runs are up on the mountains we can see out our Hotel window. Very impressive looking cable cars.

I have just been handed a VHS video of China championships 2 years ago by the Norwegian team. I had asked way back then if they could do me a copy, so at last I have one !

….

Again I’m bored at a team leaders meeting. It is delayed because a couple of countries did not hand in their start lists… so we wait….

The opening ceremony was help in a nearby town around a picturesque lake. The stage was on the lake itself. There are 29 countries represented at this championship, so I think it is bigger than China. Two Hotels (well one really but two connected parts) are entirely taken over by ARDF, as well as a camping site.

The opening ceremony was the normal sort of ceremony. Since Australia is first in the alphabet we get to lead the procession, following our local schoolkid holding the AUSTRALIA sign. Our foldable flagpole was, you guessed it, in the cylinders with the antennas back in Hungary ! I bashed into the forest on the way to the bus and picked up a straight small pine branch that served well along with our new Aussie flag we bought at the airport.



Team Bosnia Herzegovina


Lined up and Ready !


Team Australia with Austria

The biggest teams here are Russia, Bosnia H, Ukraine and Germany. China was expected to bring a big team but has cancelled many due to some inability to get flights. Neither Mr Han or Madam Chen are here.

The ceremony started with the normal photo taking, and then the procession. Then 3 almost identical interminable speeches in 2 languages, and at last it was declared Open. Following were some traditional Slovakian singers and dancers. In the last song the dancing girls came out to the competitors and led us a in a human chain around the lake (with of course us leading!).



The Opening Ceremony


The Slovakian Dancers

At last the meeting has started. We just get the low down on the map size, contours, orientation and so on. Also details of what we do at the Start when we get off the bus and how long before the Start time you need to front up to the controlled Start area. Even all this takes quite a while because the instructions are given in Slovakian and translated into English (the official language of the competition). Interestingly they create 3 different starting lists, and then one is selected at random. Not sure why this is.

There is a cable car that operates in summer, so if we get time it would be great to take a ride up later on.

Elecronic devices are banned from the Start area in case of cheating (eg. Taking a picture with a digital camera and sending it out via a mobile back to the un-started competitors in your team).

STILL at the meeting. Getting sleepy…yawns ! Nearly 2 hours now. They are argueing technicalities about the slightly unusual finish corridor setup. With 29 countries all trying to follow the English the possibilities for misunderstanding are endless. Now it’s been changed ! At last. Someone else can be team leader next time !

Adventures in the Tatra


Well, today was the first biggie…the first world championship event for these championships.

How did we go ? Did we win ?

You think I’m going to tell you everything so you don’t need to bother reading all my other blather. No way !!

It was a 5:45am wake up today. Still, the mountains looked eerie in the dawn light. We had to get all our shit together and be on the bus at 7am. We drove down the mountain road a ways stopping near a grassy field setup as the holding area and nearby start corridors. About 7 bus loads of competitors.



Start Compound for 2m

Everyone has to impound their equipment before they start up the transmitters in a officially run event so no-one can take bearings before they start. They took a long time to do the impounding today, calling up each country in turn. It was neat how they had metal stands to hold all the sniffer beams though.



Waiting for our starts…


My map and (approx) course


Me at TX #4 (thanks Karla!)

Everyone must be in the holding area. Once anyone leaves they cannot come back. Karla was an International Jury member, and her task was to sit at one of the transmitters, so I gave her my digital camera to take some shots of competitors actually in the field. This is normally pretty difficult to do so we’ll see what they come back like ! Had to give her the camera last night since the officials had to head out at 6am.

Bryan was off first in the 3rd start group. Competitors are let out on 5 minute intervals, normally of around 9 people from different age categories. Today they had two M21 or two M40 competitors let out at once just to get the number of competitors through.

I had to wait around an hour for my start. An hour of being nervous :O) At last after a bit of a warm up I was called up for my 10:10am start. The start order is determined by computer ballot the night before each competition, but guided by the teams preferences as to which member of the 3 person team goes 1st, 2nd or 3rd.

I had a couple of dud bearings in my first 10 or so minutes so I chose what turned out to be a non-optimum transmitter to go for 1st (#3). I realised this later on the way there, but was pretty much committed by then. It was roughly in the middle of the map, and compared to some of the others found it pretty well….it just took a while to get there. My first punch of the Sport Ident was at around 25 minutes, which is pretty poor.

Harley had an interesting tale to tell about transmitter 3. He was heading downhill to it with some fairly thick scrub to his left.He started to hear crashing and smashing noises in the scrub. This got louder, also accompanied by loud grunts. Being from Montana US his immediate thought was “that sounds like a bear and it’s heading straight for me”. Well funnily enough it turned out to be just that, and a pretty big one at that !!. The bear crashed out of the scrub not more than 4 metres from Harley. Harley gave a loud “ARGGGH” noise and waved his map board vigourously at the bear. The bear was as startled as he was and immediately did a U turn back into the scrub. We suspect the bear may have been disturbed by another competitor.

I knew now I had to head back almost due North to get the #5 (which is the one I should have got first). I ran there pretty quickly, being pretty confident where to go, but got confusing bearings near it. Took about 3 cycles (15 minutes) to finally find it whereas it should have taken 1.

The next one #2 a distant one way to the East, and that one, plus the way I picked to it went pretty well. A little bit of mucking about near it again.

Now it was #4 roughly South. Somehow I got confused about a road junction and got a bit lost when the road didn’t go where I thought it should, so I went bush. I know now where I went, but at the time I was less than sure. Despite this I didn’t do too badly on this leg, with some slow down due to messy terrain (since I didn’t know where I was exactly). There were lots of swampy creeky bits on the map, with heaps of running water.

I overshot #4 a bit and had to head back when it came on (the transmitters take turns 1 minute each). I found it after it had turned off just by following my last bearing. As it turns out this ws the trasnmitter Karla was stationed at, and as I headed off from the control stand I saw her taking a picture of me.

I knew roughly where my last TX #1 was on the map (back betwen the start and the finish), but the problem was I didn’t know quite where *I* was. I headed off down a road that seemed to head in the direction of my bearing to #1, but after a while it started to diverge too far South. Again I went bush after being unable to find the track that ran East-West I’d hoped to see. Luckily a saw a house in the distance. AHHH I know where I am now… bit South of where I’d hoped but not a disaster. #1 took me way too many cycles t find. It gave really erroneous bearings close by. I’ve never had so many problems. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t used to the borrowed antenna. I really don’t know. You can always be more confident with gear you KNOW.

Anyway, back up the hill to the finish. I tried to run up but was simply too buggered to be able to, so I alternated running and walking. I walked just prior to the finish corridor so I could put on a good race up the public area (these things are important :-)).

Overall I took 129 minutes, just piping Csaba on 132 minutes (YAY). Adam did a commendable 96 minutes, and Bryan 4 TX’s 139 minutes. I don’t know the placings right now, but it’s well down with the winning time just under 62 minutes for M21.

One thing with these championships is they know how to celebrate. The finish area and chute was a carnival atmosphere. Music and people with rattles and bells cheering on their teams. I had a boomerang throwing seesion with one of Roger’s Boomerangs (very poplar Roger!).

The food here is excellent, so I’m now off to dinner.a Later will be the prize ceremony for the 2m competition, and Tommorow will be the tour day. At this stage have no idea where to !



Finish Area for 2m


2m Prize giving ceremony outside Hotel


The M19 category (with Marmints)


The German team celebrate!

…. – time passes again

Been to the prize giving ceremony. Again heaps of celebration. The teams that figured most were the bigger teams: Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic.

Also good to see a bit more variation in the womens categories with China 3rd and Kazakstan, Estonia in there somewhere. They had 3 Beavers who helped with the celebrations.

The theme of the night has been celebration. The Germans are occupying the floor below us and are having a great time having done very well in some team events. You can’t go past without joining in for a bit. Bryan is a bit drunk after having consumed “Fox Hunting Fluid” which is an unusual sight !

Some good news is the FTP is now working. Try http://www.netspace.net.au/index.html for the first couple of my reports with real pictures!

Floating on the Borderline


Well, before I go into the tour days events, I’ve got some 2m competition results for those who might be interested.

The Aussie Teams placings were Adam 23, Bruce 34 and Bryan 44 out of 61. 9 of those competitors were overtime in M21. Csaba (US) was 35th. Nikolay from Kazakstan came 8th, but the next KAZ entry was 27th. Ukraine was 1st with just under 62 minutes, Slovakia 2nd and Czech Republic 3rd.

More impressive sounding are the teams results. These are taken by taking the best two results of the 3 competitors in a team and adding their times to get an overall team ranking. In our case my and Adam’s results were added to give us 11th place out of 16 valid team entries in M21. Since there are 29 countries here, most with an M21 team, it looks like there were quite a few teams that didn’t even get two valid entries to add (ie. 2 or more were overtime). Unfortunately USA in M21 was one of those not valid.

It is good to see we beat the French, and were just piped by Norway. If you take the “real amateur radio teams” (those with callsigns) we did even better !

Incidentally, Stephan’s M19 German team came 5th. Another interesting result is 1st, 2nd and 3rd in M19 were all Czech Republic, and again 1st, 2nd and 4th in D19 (Womens) as well as placings in some of the other categories.

By the way, the offical amateur station of the event callsign is OM9FOX.

Today was the tour day, a day of rest between the two competitions. We had about an hour or so bus ride (8 buses!!). Australia lucked on the modern bus (Austrian) rather than on one of the older (Czech) buses. The destination was the Dunajec river right on the border between Slovakia and Poland. After a bit of a wait we boarded rafts on the river made from 6 smaller boats lashed together. They are done this way to ease trasporting the boats back upstream on trucks. 20 years ago they used to be transported back upriver by horse and cart up an ancient road beside the river made from stonewall (no cement).



Awaiting the Rafts


Whitewater Rafting on the Dunajec


Ramming Speed!


Who’s that idiot poling ?

We rafted from Majere Kvasne Luky to Lesnica, about 11km. Each raft had two polemen, one of which could speak English to give us some commentary. In a quieter part of the river (lazy river) I had a go at poling the raft myself. A very pleasant journey. It took just over an hour to float down.

After lunch at the destination port, we were bused to Poprad, the major town in this region of Slovakia. Free time to go shopping or whatever. One interesting thing we saw was one of the event posters in a shop window.

Whilst most of us were having a fun time, the majority of the US team had decided to take the van and car and go on a self-tour. Things didn’t go quite as planned !

First stop was a castle. They parked, hiked up 800m or so only to be barred by a annoyingly shut gate. Since they had come so far they decided to break in. This involved something to do with rocks under the gate to raise it. Harley had just slipped under the gate and a woman came running to let them in. Luckily nothing was said about the rocks…. Once they got in they found other people were wandering about…surely they hadn’t all broken in too ??? Nah…they had parked in the wrong carpark. There was another on the other side with only a 20m walk to the castle 🙂

Next disaster occurred when they decided to cross the border to Poland. Nadia (US team) was on a Russian passport, and her Slovakian visa was a single entry type. She had to wait with another on the border whilst the others went in and proceeded to get thoroughly lost! After finding where they were, eventually, they had little time left but to go back and pick up Nadia and head home… All in all we probably had the better time with the rafting 🙂

Again I’m taking the opportunity of the team leaders meeting to write this report, but this one seems to be going a bit more smoohly, so far. One leader has brought up the ludicrous concept of allowing smoking at a world championship sports event, so the organisers have banned it. Yay !

Ooops it all seemed to be going so well…but now there is some problem with the Bosnia H. team entries in the database for the start ballot.

PS: German ARDF software costs 75 Euros for the 1st copy and can be downloaded.

World ARDF 2002 Part 3

Mills End


Today was our final practice event. If we haven’t got it by now we’re not going to get better during the world champs next week !

It was a longer full 80m event, set by Gyrui and Daniel. Daniel had to head off at the Start since he was taking a train journey to a major orienteering event to the North on Sunday. Good Luck Daniel !! I ran the Start and hence headed off last.

Gyrui had set an interesting course where you had to run in and out of a couple of the controls. He did this, he said, to prove what a poor thing this is since competitors see other competitors coming out as they are heading in. Well it happened for me so I guess he proved his point.

I really only made one mistake in the event making a pretty poor navigational choice at one point that took me way way down a valley and up again (pant pant). Probably cost me 10 minutes or so. I took 92 minutes, and for comparison Adam took 82. Others were longer, despite the fact most only had to find 4 transmitters.

It’s interesting the poor choice I made was one Gyrui had not expected anyone to do (it was meant to be his “in and out” illustration), but both myself and quiet Bob individually decided to do it the long way.



Gyuri’s 2m transmitter


Bruce Fox-oring


Orfu Lake


The Water Mill

This afternoon one car headed back to Pecs to do some shopping, and the remainder (we only had 1 car available) had a look at a nearby water-wheel mill, still operational. In fact, the building was original, but the 120 year old equipment came from other old mills in the area since the original equipment had been cleared out during socialisation (1950s). The mill was brought back into full operation only in 1994. Lots of amazing wooden tubes & grain elevators in a multi-stage process. There was also an older horse drawn mill wheel on display, but it is not operating.

We also tried to get to some caves in a nearby town, but it became obvious as it “got furthur and furthur away” that we weren’t going to make it before closing. We all may go back tommorow afternoon (Sunday).

The shoppers returned sucessfully with the main requirement: A present for Gyrui & family for all their work. There was a mad scramble to sign the card as Gyrui arrived with Susan and Thomas (I’ve been told we have to call him Tommy now). Gyrui presented us with survival certificates and some Hungarian white wine, and in turn (after a bruce pause to increase suspense) we presented them with a Canon digital camera (actually that was my idea…. it had been difficult to think of something useful for them all).

We watched the Hunagrian day fireworks on TV (went on for ages!) which had been delayed from their normal date earlier this month due to the floods. There were some strange lights shining up and about in the centre of Orfu, but on investigation they turned out just to be a light outside a pretty ordinary looking disco.

I have built a bit of a web page (it is soooo slow doing much with images on this old laptop!) but have not yet had the opportunity to upload it anywhere. May have to wait till we get to Slovakia.
 

The Twin Towers


Well after all the activity of the last week today was to be mostly a relax prior to the championships. After a very laid back start of 9:30am Gyrui took us to the TV tower overlooking Pecs. As well as the city itself we’d visited on Thursday, we could also spot some of the areas we’d run in towards Orfu. Gyrui also pointed out the gruelling ARDF course Danny had set for him to practice the week before… Evil !



The Ceremony


The Digital Camera


The Public Tower


The TV Tower

Gyrui had worked at the TV tower buildings years before. They also used to monitor the ham bands for “good protocol” at listening stations there ! Later Gyrui described how he was often monitored himself during socialisation; speaking another language (German), being intelligent and good at electronics made him a prime suspect for crimes against the state.

We also climbed a nearby public tower on a neigbouring hill that we could see from the TV tower to get a better view towards Orfu. From the 2nd tower we could see the bigger of the two Orfu lakes. Next door was an obvious military TDOA direction finding setup.

The area of this tower is an old volcanic region with rock just below the surface, so the trees tend to be fairly short and the rain falls staright through the porus rock cracks. Gyrui refered to this as ‘cast’ region.

Afterwards Gyrri & Tommy had to leave us as Tommy had a school opening ceremony for the start of the school year this afternoon (Sunday since it was a church school).

We made another attempt to get to the caves but were foiled yet again ! This time we were driving, but when we got into the car we found the gauge was on E. On advice from the information centre in Orfu we headed off on a10km trek to the closest fuel station. Despite being assured it would be open it was in fact shut (well it was Sunday). After enquiring for Benzino (the local could speak only Hungarian and Spanish) we found the closest from there was another 20km. No guarantee they would be open either. Instead we elected to limp back to Orfu on fumes hoping we’d make it back the 10km…. so much for the caves, which would have only been a 12km round trip. Oh well. Turns out the gauge misreads considerably and there is about 100km on E, but we weren’t to know.

Susan, Gyrui and Tommy appeared again after dinner (bearing another bottle of home made red wine from Gyrui’s father). Danny is due to return late tonight from the orienteering competition. Update: In the car now on the way to Slovakia. We have two cars and one mini-van so it’s quite comfy. It was an early start though, and since we’re not really on a major highway it could take a while. As we go through each town we see the kids all dressed up for the 1st day at school.



The Three Piece


Goodbye Pecs


Group Photo

World ARDF 2002 Part 2

Marauding Turks

Today was the “day off” from ARDF/orienteering practice, and was more of a tour day of Pecs, the city near our bruce village of Orfu. After a pretty relaxed start to things we squeezed into our two cars and headed off to Pecs. As it happened this took us back through the maps we had already been on so things started to look uncannily familier. We also saw a full dual horse drawn cart on the road as we left Orfu…not acommon sight apparently, but not unusual. Susan, Gyrui’s wife used to be a tour guide in an earlier life, so she was the ideal person to show off her local town. We started off at a roundhouse from around the 15th century. This was built inside the moat as part of the city walls to defend the city against the Turks who regularly tried to take over the city (and often did). Unfortunately the hill beside the town made it easy for invaders to see everything about the towns defenses and their weaknesses. The town in fact has an original Roman name, Sopianae, dating back 2000 years. Some of the road routes around (we went on one on the way to a practice event) follow the original Roman road route. We just don’t get recorded history like that in Australia (something a century old is considered ancient).



The Roundhouse


Inside Roundhouse


No Petrol !

The Bishopric (church) was built over centuries so has many different styles (and looks it). There is a china crypt underneath which is in fact the original 11th century church that used to be at ground level but was built over later. They have problems stabilising the  whole thing since half is on rock and the other is built on ancient pines (permanently sodden) in a swamp. They have to keep careful note of the water level and keep it topped up if it drops too low (and endanger the pines). One thing it does have is the 3rd biggest organ in Europe. Over 6000 pipes.

Once some workers had found a grail (cup) in a tree that had been hidden there for centuries. Each time the city seemed in danger of being overrun the Bishop’s valuables were secreted wherever they could be hidden or buried. The cup is now displayed along with others in the church.

Under the city are many many cellars since it’s a wine making area. In places up to 20 levels deep. Often the inhabitants were able to escape, complete with horses and carts, out the cellar complex away from Turkish invaders. We visited a cellar to taste some bishop’s Wine” which was in fact a Riesling, but the region is famous for the Cirfandli variety.
 



The Bishopric


Crypt (original church)


Bishop’s Wine Cellar

One fascinating thing we saw in the town were a couple of gates with hundreds of padlocks clamped all over them. It’s a tradition amongst students leaving the town to put their old locker padlocks on one of these gates to give them hope that they may return someday. We were lucky enough to witness a couple of padlocking ceremonies where a poem was read out ond the padlock affixed to the growing cluster. Jack would have a field day !

We saw inside a Christian Mosque. What is that you ask ? Have I got that right ? Well, yes… half is a Moslim Mosque built by the invading Turkish, and the other half a Roman Catholic church. In the same building, with both a cross and a half moon on the apex !  Something perhaps to be learnt in tolerance here with some of the current world events.  Hungariana, Croatians, Serbs and Swabians all live in Pecs
 



Lock Ceremony


Pecs central square


Christian Mosque

We visited Susan’s favorite museum. It was purely for a painter called Csontvary who had been a phamacist until 40 years old when he suddenly had an inner voice that told him he must become an artist. The paintings at first glance are just impressive (and mostly huge), but then you notice some of the weirdness of scale or colour. Very unusual. His main aim (he was quite mad apparently) was the paint the colours of the sun. Lunch was at Gyrui’s parents place, and this was to be a pretty big affair. Rice meat balls in a sauce, with a vodka toast and home made wine (from grapes grown right in the garden)… both red and white, but the red was better. Bob has a bottle to take to Slovakia.

At Gyrui’s office I was able to send off some of my reports (at last). I have no idea if they all got through but I will check next time. I had also prepared a web page to upload with a bruce selection of pictures, but was unable to then due to time constraints (the computer I tried orginally didn’t work so I had to wait in line for Gyrui’s. We had some free time to wander about the old city centre after that, buy this & that, and then off the Gyuri’s place for dinner. More wonderful food… fruit soup, a pototoe/cheese/hungarian-salami delicious thing and a layered biscuit desert (this was the ‘american’ version… we’d tried the traditional hungarian version at lunch). This one was Daniel’s favorite, but judging by the number Thomas ate of both varieties he’s not far behind here. Anyway, I must get off this and get ready for bed. Tommorow is yet another 2m event in the morning, and fox-oring (with longer antennas this time) in the afternoon !



Pecs


Gyrui’s Shack


Dinner at Gyuri’s

Fox-orfu

Today was back to the practice with another double banger.

The 2m event in the morning was meant to be a shorter event, but it didn’t quite work out that way !  TX#5 had battery problems. It
would tranmit fine for 5 seconds or so, then give seemingly random blips and burps for the rest of the minute cycle. Unfortunately
it was probably the best TX to do first, so this was a trifle inconvenient.

We all ended up very scratched from prickles, blackberries, nettles and other associated nasties. The map was a bit out of date and the light green should now be very deep green, and some of the white pretty dark green too. Also TX#5 was in a white bit in the middle of green accessed from only a couple of ways…. obvious if you could have had more than 5 seconds DF every 5 minutes, but tricky in the circumstances.

Csaba, a local, wore shorts to the event since he recalled the map from about 10 years ago when he’d orienteered there. Well, the scratches and blood afterwards would rival that of a well known Bayside orienteer !
 



2m Start


2m Finish


Bob heads off

Personally once I had wasted an age fighting spikey things (memories of YDF foxhunts) the rest was tackled in quick order.

Afternoon was the 2nd fox-oring event (again on 80m). Everyone agrees this one was much better than the previous attempt, mostly because the weak 80m signals could now be heard from within the circle (and in fact outside in some cases). Problems with control 3 being extremely weak, but the rest worked well with slightly longer antennas. This sort of event is a lot of fun, with 10 control points and spanish-score event style. Bryan has already laid out a PCB prototype on his laptop in a few spare moments (the transmitters are little more than a NOR gate and a crystal) so it woul be good to try it out at an orineteering ‘meet’ (as the Yanks here call them).

I took 44 minutes for the 10 controls, Adam zipped around in 35 and Csaba, who I was competing against directly as he headed off just after me, managed to overtake me with a bit more luck at control 3 (see above) and took 38 minutes. All pretty close !

I went for a swim today again in the lake afterwards, but I only heard later on that Bryan decided he wouldn’t as he had seen a snake swimming by in the water… hmmm oh well.

Seems Bob and Dick are the SportIdent “gurus” for their orienteering club, so we had a number of discussions about SportID software and control failures. Yes, they get failures too, and as often during an event as when at sleep. They are less than convinced about the supposed EMC cause. All sounds pretty familier stuff. Sport Ident will be used at these upcoming world ARDF  championships in Slovakia, so it’ll be interesting to see what software they will be using.

At the moment Harley and Bob are working on Bob’s 2m sniffer. He tweaked it up a bit before the event this morning and broke something, so now it’s being tackled in a logical fashion.

Update: Don’t know if they’ve managed to fix it… seems to be something wrong with the front end in the “Ron Graham” sniffer type.
I nearly broke Ian’s 80m sniffer today trying to tweak it a little down in frequency so I can also pick up the upcoming 3.550 Slovakian homing beacon. It seems the tiny parallel capacitor can’t be removed…so I had to put it back. Relief when it worked again as before !
Oh well, I doubt I’ll need the homing beacon anyway if all goes well 🙂

Update on the update: Seems I can pick up the homing beacon with the knob turned to the extreme position.

Tommorow is our last practice event; a long 80m hunt, so until then….

World ARDF 2002 Part 1

Welcome everyone !

This is my report of our trip to Hungary and Slovakia. Firstly, a bit of introduction for those who haven’t read these reports before. They are my very informal ramblings of the Australian Team’s experiences. Usually accurate but I don’t always check my facts, so apologies in advance for any mis-spelled place-names, dodgy geography or just plain lies. The reports will vary widely in quality and spelling accuracy depending on how much time I have. Basically, just read the interesting bits…. it’s just the interesting bits will vary depending on who you are. This trip will (hopefully) begin with the Hungarian national ARDF (Amateur Radio Direction Finding, or radio orienteering as it’s also known as). The championships are 2 days with an event on each day. After that we have a mixed week of training and sightseeing around the Pecs area of Hungary (pronounced “Pege”). These have been organised by Nagy Gyuri of the US team (but also who happens to be a Hungarian resident). After that we head off to the World ARDF Championships (the big one) in Slovakia. More about all that later ! I am currently sitting at a an outside table in a school camp near Parad. Parad area isa tourist/holiday area about 2 hours (crazy) drive from Budapest. We arrived in Budapest with little incident, but completely stuffed from the long airline journey (Melbourne-KL-Vienna-Budapest). Annoyingly we flew right over Budapest on the way into Vienna, but had to overshoot and take another little prop plane back. Unfortunately had to spend quite a few hours at Budapest airport (which has very hard seats totally uninviting for sleeping) waiting for Bob Cooley to arrive on a later flight from the US. Jumped into a couple of cars (Gyugy’s..pronounced ‘Guri’) and zoomed off to Parad.  



Our Cabin


Hungarian Camp


Dinner at the camp

Today was a 7am start for the 2 metre ARDF competition. The food here is basic but quite acceptable, but we got a bonus bit of chocolate birthday cake this evening (it explained why the little boy sitting nearby was so excited). On the way to the competition the bus was running a bit late so we were asked to walk down the dirt road into the camp so the bus didn’t have to negotiate that.After aboiut 10 minutes waiting, the bus thundered down the road to where we were waiting and hurled around the corner nearly crashing into two cars coming out from the camp. Bit of excitment to start off with. The competition ? Well Adam did pretty well taking 119 minutes (150 minute time limit) coming 7th overall in F21 (Male 21 in Hungarian). Bryan was happy bagging 4 almost right on his time limit. The astute of you will have noticed I haven’t mentioned one of the Aussie’s yet…. (yes it’s me). I’ll give you a bit of a description of my course later. Fastest overall was 60 minutes which is kinda inhuman 🙂 Of the Yanks the Leach’s were happy getting medals for 2nd & 3rd (due in part to the fewer competitiors in their sections), and Csaba (pronunced ‘Cshubba’, another Hungarian/US competitor) took 10 minutes longer than Adam. The rest well, weren’t all that happy with their day. OK, here’s a bit of a description of my event.
I was due to start 30 minutes after the competitior. Competitors are let out at 5 minute intervals with one competitor from 4 categories (age/sex). I was the first Aussie out. Bryan was 10 minutes later. The map was largly free running, but with some areas of deep green (and in retrospect the deep green here means truly impassable) and a few open areas grass areas. And Hilly. Lots and LOTS of hills. 5m contours in some places squeezed together so close they nearly join.
At the start I took the opportunity to draw a circle around the start location of 750m since we know no transmitters can be within this distance. I also draw a 500m circle around the finish since there’s a transmitter there (Homing Beacon) and another course setting rule is trasnmitters cannot be closer than 500m from each other. I decided based on the map to head off somewhere to the right from the start since the finish was to the left, and I wanted to leave that side of the map till later. When I was let out I did get a bearing to transmitter #2 off to the right so it seemed my strategy was correct. Transmitter #1 was stronger and straight up, but I still decided to leave that till after 2. The rest were to the left.
I should mention, for those who don’t know, that the transmitters are all on the same channel, but take turns transmitting 1 minute each so only 1 is ever on at a time. There are 5 transmitters each with a nearby orienteering control flag and punch. Well, it took me a while, but I finally had to admit I’d stuffed up, and the bearing I’d had initially had to 2 was just plain wrong. Oh well, back to #1, then wap up the hill to #5, which went ok, but took me a while close to the transmitter due to some spurious bearings then too. Also, the Hungarians seem to be keen on hiding their transmitter flags behind things and close to the ground (Go David B!!).
I was a bit knackered after the hill(s), and my stuff-ups, but my next leg right across to the top of the map (through a pine forest deep green zone on tracks) was probably my best. It was hidden right up an overgrown creek gully just within he far side of the pines. My attempt from #3 to #2 is where things went a bit astray.
Not sure exactly what I did but I ended up on a different track than I thought and wasn’t really concentrating enough. I think I actualy went off the map. I then went through a fenced field full of blackberries (oh what fun) wasting lots of time. It was in a pine forest I finally figured out where I was (luckily back on the map)…. quite a long way from where I thought I was. Ooops. changed my plan to go go #4 now (near the finish) and back to #2 later if I still had time before the 150 minute time limit. There was no water at any of the transmitters, it was fairly hot and muggy, and at nearly 2 hours out there I was feeling a bit dehydrated and doing silly things.
I had to endure the embarrasment of going back through the finish chute to get to #4. Finding #4 went well initially heading up a hill. I was probably only 50m from in when Bryan came down the hill past me also looking for #4, convinced he hadn’t gone past it. We stuffed around in some nearby gullies (re-entrants) getting lots of reflections till I finally got a bearing back up the hill I was originally heading up. I never did find #4 since after wasting nearly 15 minutes mucking about I was near my time limit anhad to abondon the search. Bryan tells me that I was within a few metres of the flag, but since they were so well “hidden” it was no surprise I didn’t see it (when it was not transmitting). Bryan had another 10 minutes and so had the luxury of waiting for #4 to come on again. To make things worse I got a really bad stitch on my dash back to the finish, slowing me down considerably. I was a mere 1.5 minutes overtime (a DNF). Damm !! … and I had missed 2 transmitters. Hopefully a better day tommorow. After a late lunch back at the camp Csaba and Gyuri took us for a drive to a nearby TV tower on a hill for the view. It also happened this hill was a local ski resort (apparently using rope tows). We were able to see the area we had run/staggered on in the morning in the distance from the tower. On the return journey we also popped into a GoKart track just beside the road and had a bit of high speed fun (no helmuts). I lapped Adam and Csaba at least 2 times, and afterwards one of the Hungarian track organisers congratulated me (in English – which hadn’t been evident beforehand) on being a very “good driver”. Tommorow will be the 80m competition. My home made loop is definitely too deaf, so lucky I popped past Ian’s place the other night to pick up his (thanks Ian!). Hopefully we will all do better then.



Map of Parad Area


Group on Tower


TV tower on hill

80m Event Hungarian Championships


It’s afternoon here in Parad after lunch following the 80m metre event. Last night had a bit of a chat with some local ARDF’ers who are also radio amateurs. Seems like the licencing scheme is very similar to Aussie here. Jack WWW would like the comment one of the younger amateur competitors made (Chrstian): When I started ARDF the map was just a thing for putting in my pocket. Now I use it a little more, but still spend a lot of time pushing through the plants (bush-bashing). ‘ This can happen a lot if you don’t know where you are on the map (like me at one point yesterday) and you simply try to head on a bee-line between transmitters. In Budapest they even used to have an annual car-based radio direction finding hunt (foxhunt) like our Mt Gambier annual competition, but the polic didn’t like it and banned it. Too many people with their heads out the windows or something like that ! (not a mention of spikey bits, however).

Well the event today started a little cooler, possibly because it was about an hour earlier. [Damm the mosquitoes are attacking me here grrr]. We used the same map as yesterday, but a different start location. On the way there the bus took us straight through the middle of the map, so we were able to track it’s progress and know exactly where the start was when we arrived. In fact, the organisers asked us if we could re-use our maps fromn yesterday if they weren’t too damaged. My map now has two start locations marked on it. Again the course setter liked hiding the control flags on the ground, and I’m told he doesn’t like using flags at all and would prefer there to just be a punch, preferablly painted brown or black 🙂 I have no problem with searching out a difficult hidden transmitter if it transmits all the time, but when you have to wait 4 minutes till the TX you are trying to find comes on again i it’s cycle, this approach is a bit unreasonable.
 


Bryan at 80m Start

…and off we go !!

On the tower

In a few minutes we will have the prise ceremony for 80m. The best result is Harley who bumped up a place to 2nd today. Karla should also do well after finding 2 transmitters out of 3 in her veterans category. I came about 6th (to be confirmed) with 96 minutes, Adam about 7th (101 minutes) and Bryan 9th-ish with 122 minutes, all with 5 trasnmitters. We all did them in different orders, so the course could be tackled a number of ways.

One thing I noticed about these championships is they seemed pretty informal. People were asking me all the time where various transmitters were, some even managing the request in English ! The orienteers amongst you will how “not on” this sort of thing normally is, but few seemed to care a great deal. After the ceremony we have to leave to get to Pecs tonight.

[Update]: Just been to the ceremony which was held outside. Karla, Harley and Gyuri were all awarded placings. There were 72 competitors in this National Hungarian championships with a good junior contingent (U15,U17 and U19 categories for both boys and girls), so the sport is quite healthy here.
[Update 2]: In the car (a Renault) following the other Renault and the Citreon (Gyuri likes French cars), now on the flat after winding down through the spectacular hills where we have spent the weekend. The cars here a a curious mix of old style looking (possibly Russian lineage) box cars abd modern western european cars we would all know. Not sure when I’ll be able to send these reports out, but hopefully sometime this week.

PS: Jodi, distinct lack of O’Henry bars in evidence here.
 



Finish Chute


Gyuri wins Silver


Ski run from tower

Orfu for you


It’s the night after our first practice event in the Pecs areas of Hungary. Another two hopefuls have just arrived (Bod – (loud bob) and Dick) both from US. They came on the train from Budapest (after flying from the US). Well, actually a huge mixture of trains, buses, planes and subways I can’t keep track of, plus Bob has become seperated from his luggage.

The rest of us arrived last night somewhat after the expected time partly due to one of the Renaults developing a fault with the the throttle getting stuck full on, but it was easily fixed. The house we’re all staying at is great, if fairly compact. There are balconies back, front and upstairs so plenty of relaxation areas. Breakfast we get ourselves in the house, but lunch and dinner are catered at a local resturant which so far has proved to be delicious (especially the soups).
 



Our Orfu House


Daniel and Thomas


Marvin Naps

This morning was declared a rest morning (recovery after the championships) but this afternoon was the first practice ARDF event on 2m. The area here near the bruce village of Orfu has about 7 orienteering maps all in the same area. They are spread around two china lakes right near town. The event today was on one of these maps, consisting of lots of china sink holes (shown as depressions with surrounding coutours)…. great to navigate by as long as you don’t lose track, because once you do they all look the same (speaking from experience). A fascinating terrain.

Today’s event was on 2m and was set by Gyrui and his son Daniel (a keen local orienteer). His younger son Thomas helped with the Start. Unfortunately one of the transmitters (#5) failed to work, so this one became an orienteering control instead. Gyrui had put out water at a couple of controls, and since it was again pretty hot this made a lot of difference.

Here’s what I got up to (skip this bit if you don’t want to read the ARDFy sorta bits):
I started off with a smart move to backtrack to get to a main road to make it easy to get the TX5 (which was the “orienteering” marked location). The alternative route meant a big deep gully crossing which seemed wise to avoid, and also I was higher so hopefully could get better bearings. As it turned out I never did get #5, not finding it despite careful re-location since I had mistaken a depression on the map for a knoll. I gave up on it after 20 minutes since we had restricted time of only 80 minutes and I wanted to get more of the real controls. It was also a practice event. Next was #2 which I did ok. My next choice was #1. This was based on what turned out to be pretty dodgy bearings and was a LOT furthur away than I expected. I got a bit lost amongst the many depressions (and even considered going back for #4 which would have been a better 3rd choice in retrospect). I persevered, however, but after finally bagging the distant #1 had no clear idea where I was. I had to simply head back on my last bearing for #4 which I found pretty quickly luckily. I had a vague idea where I was now sinly because my bearings for #4 earlier on had seemed pretty good, so where they crossed should be where I was (hopefully). They were, and I was, and I also hit a clearing soon on the way to #3 that certified where I was (phew!). I got #3 pretty quickly, which was lucky because I was on my last few minutes before the time limit, and I could not have afforded another cycle (5 minutes). A mad sprint back to the start and I got there at 79 minutes ! My problems mainly stemmed from losing proper map contact #2-#1 (in part due to a mis-estimation of exactlywhere #2 was), and therefore not picking up #4 when I should have (since I didn’t know I had gone within 200m of my guesstimates since I didn’t know really where I was). Misreading the depression for #5 was annoying, but it was poorly marked, and I now know the mapping style a bit better. Adam also only got 4 TX’s (he missed #4 partly due to it being off frequency a bit), but he got back 4 or so minutes less time than I did. Practice event so we don;’t really care, but at least I wasn’t alone in having some difficulties.

Tommorow morning we have an 80m practice event, so I’m off to bed now !
 



First Practice Start


Bryan’s Foxoring Map Remains


Dinner in Orfu

That Sinking Feeling

Last night things ended up a bit later than Gyuri was expecting and they had to pick up some of the 2m transmitters in the dark. Still, Daniel had a pretty good feel for the map having orienteered there many times before. This morning was an 80m practice event. A different map from yesterday, but still lots and lots of sink-holes in parts. The map was bisected by a main road which ran down a big central gully. I’m back at the guest house now and it’s just a perfect sunny morning. Not nearly as hot as yesterday afternoon so much better for running about.

This afternoon Gyuri is setting up a fox-oring event which should be interesting. Fox-oring is a mix between ARDF and orienteering. You are given a map with a number of china circles on it. You have to orienteer to each of the circles, and once withing the circle you should be able to hear a low powered transmitter that is somewhere in the circle (not right in the middle of course). I will truly get to see how I orienteer amongst the sink-holes since we’re using the same map as this morning. Continued below…..

For this morning here’s my ARDFy bit again !
Many of the bearings from the start were in a similar direction, so not much could be determined there, except that #2 seemed stronger. I had temporarily removed the speaker from Ian’s sniffer so that I could attach a compass onto the sniffer itself (using an old toothbrush as a strut). This made getting bearings less confusing and quicker than during the championships on the weekend. Headed straight down the hill to #2, but when I reached a major road and #3 came on it became obvious I was already behind me to my right. It seemed a good idea to head back to #3 since getting it later would be inconvenient. I did that but took a couple of 5 minute cycles to actully get back up the hill to it. It was right on the 750m exclusion zone circle ! Next was #2 where I had narrowed it down to a particular gully. Sure enough it was there, but a little furthur down it than I expected. I now had a choice of staying up on this side of the main road and heading to the more distant #5, or crossing the road and going an unknown distance up the hill on the other side for #1. I plumbed for #5. Weaved through some sink holes on the way there but eventually got there. Had to wait another cycle to find the thing hidden in a sink-hole itself. Now since I’m now past the finish down the other end of the map I head across the main road now to the equally distant #4. Didn’t take too long on this one even though it was in another sink-hole. My later bearings on #4 were good, but the original ones from the start weren’t good at all (it was weak so I had to use the sniffer in modulation rather than whoopee mode which gives a vaguer bearing). Back past the uphill side of the finish (near the main road) to #1. Unfortunately it turned off just as I was approaching it, and in the meantime I wasn’t lucky enough to look in the right sink-hole depression. Snapped it as soon as it did come on and sprint to the nearby finish. In retrospect leaving #1 till later was the right decision. My time was 66 minutes, much better than yesterday. Adam was 82 minutes (he did #2 first then went back to #3). ……

It’s now evening (we just made a sudden time shift). Well fox-oring was fun. Gyuri and Daniel had set a short course of 10 controls. Start and finish were at the same place as this mornings finish and the course was set in a complex sink-hole area. You can do the controls in any order (spanish score). As it turned out Gyuri hadn’t tried this antenna with the mini 80m transmitters (little more than a CMOS oscillator) and the ones he had set down sink holes didn’t get out quite as much as expected, so for a good part of the course it was more a pure orienteering event with really vague control circles (the circles were about 150m in diameter) rather than a direction finding hunt. The transmitters Danny had set were somewhat higher and 3 of these I actually was able to DF before I actually saw the flag. I must have spent nearly half the time at a single control that had a well hidden flag right on the circle boundary. I was not alone as nearly everyone was there at one stage ! Other than a bit of vague wandering about once within the a circle looking for a signal or a more often the flag itself, I enjoyed the event and the concept, and I’m keen to try something like that back home. Just asI was finding my last control (#8 as it happens), and incidentally this was one I was able to hear and DF, the storm that I had been hearing in my headphones for most part of the event (ouch that one was LOUD!!) finally broke. I made it back to the car just as it started to pour (not that it would have mattered). Bryan wasn’t so lucky and we later saw his miserable excuse for what was left of his map….

For the 2nd time we had somehow managed to muck up giving the house key to the wrong person, so I had to repeat my trick of clambering up to the 2nd storey and getting in the (luckily left open again) balcony window. Susan, Gyuri’s wife, is the director for a new school in Pecs, so in this pre-term period is going mad orgainising impossible schedules and so forth, but she was able to help this evening for ferrying people around and replenishing the brekky supplies.

Tommorow we are promised a harder/longer 2m event in the morning, and various strategies to use in the afternoon. So till then, Bye All ! The next day we attempted to find the minibus that passes through Huanghua. We did eventually find roughly the correct bus stop, but an English speaking chinese gentleman was able to inform us that the bus wasn’t running today due to the rain. We caught a bread-box taxi (a very bruce bread shaped mini-van) driven by a Chinese woman. It was a bit of a slow day for the bread-boxes, so we were able to negatiate the trip down to Y40 from Y60 we’d been offered earlier. For a 70 minute or so drive, A$10 between 3 of us sounded a pretty good deal.
 

One Bastard is all it takes

  This morning dawned very hazy after the rain last night. It’s always a little bit hazy here, not nearly as bad a China, but certainly not the crisp view we’re spoilt with in Australia (well most of the time anyway). My O pants were stll dampish from the washing the previous evening (washing has become almost a daily activity here since we have limited running clothing) but wearing them for a few minutes dried them out. The house comes with what I had at first thought was a tiny washing, but after the water I poured in splashed out onto my feet I deduced it was merely a mini spin dryer. Note to Kevin Maloney: I’ll be needing some new O pants and shoes when I get back ! The Bayside Club tops are holding up well however. One of the Bob’s now has a Bayside T-shirt, so if there should ever be any Bayside members in USA and they see one say hi ! Mostly ARDF bits to follow (coz that’s wot we’re bin doin’ of course). Gyrui had set this mornings course on the same map as yesterday, mainly I suspect because he and Danny like it. With a different Start and Finish everything changes of course. I was really doing very well today…until I tried to get my 4th TX (#4 as it happens). I wasted about 30 minutes mucking about in it’s vicinity. Crossing the road, running up the hill, running down, crossing the road again, running up the other side…. Where IS this bastard tranmitter ??? I was 5 minutes away from abandoning it (I wanted to leave 30 minutes to get the final transmitter #2 which was somewhere the other side of the finish and get back before the 2 hour time limit), feeling pretty despondent, when I just happened to glimpse it the other side of a heavily overgrown pretty deep sink hole. Oh well… at least I knew where it was as I clambered through the shubbery. I ended up taking just over 100 minutes altogether, and I estimate about 40 of those minutes were on #4. Afterwards I was reminded that #4was the one that was off frequency… well that explains why I kept overshooting back and forth so much, so I didn’t feel so bad. Lunch and dinner are both provided each day at a local guesthouse/resturant. The highlight after all this activity is definitely the yumptious Hungarian soups (last night we were even served a cold fruit soup). Since Gyrui hasn’t yet turned up for the planned afternoon round-table hints & tricks of ardf session, I went for a walk to the nearby bruceer of the lakes and swam across to the island. Just fantastic for rejuvenating those tired muscles.
  Tried to ask Gyrui intelligent questions about techniques, and heres some things I picked up (in nor particular order):

  1. Get to the boundary of the start exclusion zone as quick as possible
  2. If the bearing is weak in this early stage draw just a rough bearing, but if it is strong take the trouble to get an accurate one.
  3. The numbers of the distant controls could well be determined by the various TX numbers various classes have to leave out. In our case probably #4 or #5, maybe.
  4. You should be able to get the 1st one in the 2nd or 3rd cycle if you got out of the exclusion circle quickly.
  5. Yes, he does run hard when a TX comes on and he is reasonably close, and yes, sometimes he does lose contact with the map in these situations (which is kinda reasuring to hear…he did lose contact during the 2m Hungarian championships for this reason)
  6. Always run away from the finish initially (I had already been doing this anyway), but this will be determined a bit by the positions of start and finish relative to the edge of the map.
  7. I have a short list of course setting hints (Mark remind me to send them to you; I typed them in as he was telling us).
  8. He showed us some odd techniques for trying in high reflection areas. I tried some afterwards with a test transmitter and I’m not sure I’ll be adopting these on a regular basis anytime soon 🙂 They are basically just desperation ideas.

Another good Hungarian meal in the family run guesthouse. Tommorow is a tour day around Pecs (that’s ‘Pege’ remember) and surrounds organised by Susan (Gyrui’s wife).

Bruce and Adam

World ARDF Tour 2001 Part 20

Bruce’s Report #20

We’re on the Miat airlines flight from Ulaan Baatar to Beijing. The plane seems fine (so far). Outside we can see the Mongolian landscape which is grass covered hills and plains mostly. Occasionally some trees on one side of a hill only. None of the roads are straight, possibly because the road keep changing path as some hole or obstacle becomes too big.
 


Mr Han and Us (UlaanBaatar)

The overhead wires!!

Bus stuck on track

The Chinese at the temple

Firstly, I realise I’ve somehow missed the tour day. In short, we were taken into UB to look at the Temple we’d already looked and the state department store we weren’t all that interested in. Therefore during the store bit we escaped to our internet cafe and you got one of the sets of reports and some pictures. I had to abort sending the last set of pictures as the connection was running really slow at the time (it always does when you’re in an particular hurry) and I didn’t want to miss the bus.

Panarama of Ulaan Baatar

We then proceeded in our 3 buses (one which needed an occasional crank start) to a hill overlooking UB to get an overall view from a lookout, and then a bit of a drive back to the area we’d had the 2m competition in for lunch. We proceeded along steadily worse roads till suddenly there were sparks and zaps (and gasps) from the lead bus I was in as we ran into some low slung overhead powerlines (oops). Luckily we were on rubber tyres is all I can say. There is a somewhat cavalier attitude in Mongolia (and China too) to electricity distribution. The Baht hotel appears to be wired using wires slung between the balconies and running over the doorsteps jammed in the doors.
 


Mongolian Horseman

Us and the Mongolians

After they emptied out the 3 buses they managed to get them all under the wires and after a delay we piled back in and onto a grotty track somewhere near where TX#5 was in the competition. Lunch was a picnic consisting of meat cooked using hot black rocks, rice and some vegetables, and of course potatoes. Australia was to join the Mongolians. This was fun. You are meant to handle the hot black (and slightly greasy) black rocks for good luck. The meat sauce left in the pot was also very yummy. This was the first occasion we were introduced to the fierce Mongolian Vodka too 🙂

Secondly, a story from the 80m competition. Apparently one of the Korean competitors fell into an animal trap and knocked himself out cold. The next thing he knew he was in a hospital. He was apparently found by some locals, so as far as the orgainisers of the event knew he was still out there somewhere and a search was organised. This delayed proceedings somewhat and explains the late Banquet start. After the prizes were awarded, I presented the clock to Mr Khosbayer of MRSF in appreciation for the event and hospitality.


Clock Presentation to MRSF
After the Banquet we drifted outside. The Mongolians had formed into a circle and were celebrating the event taking turns with the single vodka glass. After the Mongolian team leader asked if I could send him all the pictures we took, but instead I offered to copy them then. Unbeknownst to me this involved yet another three Vodka shots in the Mongolian control centre and I was starting to feel a bit unsteady by this stage ! Congratulations to the MRSF for running a really interesting, challenging and actually reasonably hassle free event. I hope we manage as well in 2003! 

The next day we got a lift to Ulaan Baatar along with some of the Russians who were about to catch the Trans-Siberian train to Moscow (a two day journey), and then another 2 day journey by train to Vladivostok ! The other Russians were from Lake Baikal in Russia, not far from the Mongolian Northern border. They were keen for me to try the local Lake Baikal Vodka. We were able to book into the Nassan guest house again, and as I said in the last report I did manage to find accomodation in another guest house a short walk away for the Kazakhstan team, but they must have decided to sleep at the airport afterall. I was able to send out pictures up till the end of the 2m competition here in Mongolia. The later pictures I haven’t sorted out yet ! [Ed: No hurry after all]

In the guest house we met a girl who had just arrived in Ulaan Baatar. She was about to head out on a two year stint teaching English in a small town to the North of UB as part of an “Outreach” program. She is only paid a nominal amount to live, so the work is voluntary. Another Outreach man was heading South to teach business practices. The “English” Mongolian newspaper seems to be full of lots of reports of foreign aid or Government schemes.

After lunch at another nearby cafe (even had ice cream…yum!), we phoned NyamKa and she subsequently found us. We had an interesting ride in a car to DavKa’s house in one of the suburbs. In Ulaan Baatar there seems to be little concept of maintenance or repair (a bit like Bryan’s car really). The buildings are either older Russian apartment blocks falling apart somewhat, ramshackle single storey buildings, brand new buildings or of course gers (Mongolian herders tents). When the road bitumen is damaged it, well, stays that way. There is a big dirt section on “Peace Avenue”, one of the major highways through UB. With snow or ice for much of the year maybe it doesn’t matter all that much. UB is a strange mix of the old and new. There is the Russian past still very strong, western influences much more pronouced than China but always there are reminders this is basically a herder society with cattle crossing the roads, the gers and horses riding about on the outskirts of town.


DavKa and NyamKa

Looking at (these) Pictures

Inside the Ger

Outside the Ger

NyamKa is in her third year at University studying English and Japanese. She wasn’t an ARDF competitor, but had come along with DavKa to look at the events. DavKa is studying medicine. He showed us some of his textbooks and they are mostly Russian. DavKa is part of a large family (I think 7 children). His younger brother Mec-Ka was also an ARDF competitor even though he is only 10 or so. (These are their short names … the full names are many syllables and I have no hope of remembering them all!). DavKa had twisted his ankle on the 80m event (with the terrain I’m not all that surprised) catching his foot under a root. I was amazed to see him injecting himself with an anti-inflamatory, but when I later learned he was a medical student it all made sense. (see picture Report 19).


DavKa’s House
The house was a long low building originally made of wood that had had a row of bricks added on the outside (with insufficient foundations by the look). Probably there were 4 homes in each building. The (squat) toilet is seperate and shared between many houses. Inside the house it was quite comfortable with the impressive Mongolian carpets hanging on the walls. We were treated to dinner, puzzled over some wooden puzzles, had the obligitary 3 vodka toasts and showed the family some of our pictures of the event (this laptop is really becoming very well travelled). They also took us to see inside a ger nearby belonging to some friends (in fact the driver who had given us all a lift there). DavKa had lived in a ger himself till he was 10 years old. Well this suburban ger inside had a few modifications from the original herders ger layout; the saddles were replaced by a HiFi, the fireplace in the middle replaced by an electric oven, and the women’s cabinet included a TV, but still very cosy and practical. The walls were decorated with more of the Mongolian carpets.  Afterwards we went out to get some ice creams at the local store and were chased by many little kids fascinated by the foreigners. There is a notable difference from China here with the number of kids roaming about. In China with the one child policy the parents are much more protective, and you see them holding onto their child when they go out. 

Farewell UlaanBaatar
We had a great time visiting our guests and it was sad to say goodbye back at the guesthouse.  Another thing I should note for those orienteering/rogaining people amongst you is a short ad in the paper here: “HASH HOUSE HARRIERS The Hash House Harriers run-and-walk club meet at 6:15pm every Tuesday . Meet at the front of Bayangol Hotel.” Also Alex from Kazakhstan has given us a new updated APOC 2004 brouchure if anyone is interested. Nikoli and Karina were not at this event since they probably are going to the French Region 1 championships in September instead.  Well, we’ve now landed, picked up Adam’s huge bag of Hockey gear and are awaiting the flight to Singapore. We were nearly stung by a huge excess baggage fee, but I suggested we put a few kgs extra each in our hand luggage. That brought it down a bit (and the fact we laid the luggage back on the scales as much off the scales as we thought we could get away with). Normally they wouldn’t worry about 10kg extra over 3 people, but sometimes the Chinese like to be somewhat officicious.  I have to say a special thankyou to all those who went out of their way to make us feel welcome in their countries: Jerry, Grant, Perry & Anne, Stephan, Georg & Barbel, Markus, Stefan, Mr. Han and DavKa & NyamKa. It makes all the difference on a long trip like this ! 
Thanks also to those of you who have been replying to the reports. I know they vary in quality a bit depending on where I am, how much time I manage to sequester and how tired I am. Apologies for the typos; I know they make it harder to read as they are distracting. I’m amazed sometimes how many letters end up swapped and missing when I have time to read quickly over the report before sending. This keyboard gets intermittant sometimes too (seems to be behaving at the moment however).  I’m a bit sad the trip is coming to an end, and leaving all the old and new friends. So who’s going to Slovakia in 2002 ??
Cheers from Beijing (and later Singapore…free broadband using Wavelan card!),
Bruce.
Mongolian Hat
(Mt Buller the following weekend)

World ARDF Tour 2001 Part 19

Bruce’s Report #19

Well I’m back in UB (at the same internet cafe again..since I know they allow me to connect my laptop). I’m sending pictures (slowly) at the moment, so I hope you get a chance to see them soon (still lagging behind my reports though).

[Ed: For some details of the tour day see the final report #20]

Well yesterday was a big day ! There was a team leaders meeting the night before to make certain everyone was clear about no turning on receivers after getting off the bus, and other various questions. The maps are True North, and we were able to establish magnetic North is 8 Degrees West here in Mongolia. Doesn’t make huge difference, but since 80m bearings can be more accurate well worth sorting out. Most other teams had just assumed the maps were Magnetic North !

Hills around 80m EventWe were kinda expecting that the 80m competition might be near the Hotel Baht, but instead we had another longish drive to Bumbat National park.  The terrain of this one turned out to be quite different. The trees were pine still, but the understorey often sprung out in boulder fields (which weren’t on the map). Open areas were often jumbled rocks, so very slow moving (call it a clamber !). It was a bit of luck whether one of these fields ended up in the way since there was no obvious way to navigate around them as they weren’t on the map.  I was lucky for TX#1 which was very close to the start, but had a really slow time to #2 with many of these fields appearing in my path. Eventually got there !  The next one was tricky since by direction the next one I should go for was #4, but #3 was much stronger. I elected to go for #3 prior to #4. It turned out to be the wrong choice, but I know many others did the same.
 
Waiting at the 80m StartAlex does his massages
on Mr Kim (A Korean)
Huge GrassHopper
Photo Pose in Start ChuteAlex Starting on the runShowing off equipment
DavKa’s AnkleMongolian ger at Finish
It seems there was something wrong with #4 or maybe it wasn’t radiating properly. Still, it wasn’t too much of a backtrack and I did my last #5 well. Total time 70:07. I mention the seconds here because they turned out to be important. On the display they had set up at the finish this time I dropped gradually from 2nd to 5th, and it looked good that I might stay there. Alas when we got the results later the evening I had dropped to 6th (and from 3rd to 4th in region 3) due to a Japanese competitor sneaking in ahead of me on 70:06. Yep that’s ONE second faster !! {Ed: Grrrr]
Adam managed 84 minutes (he ended up a bit lost, and also the homing beacon was a bit intermittant). Adam came 10th outright, and Bryan got 4 TX’s and came about 20th or so. The winning time was 56 minutes by Mongolia. The small Kazakhstan junior who went to China (Vladamir, 10 or 11 or so I guess) came 1st in the Junior category with 54 minutes.Quite remarkable ! My Russian roommate came 2nd with 59 minutes, despite the fact he made the same order stuff-up as I did (for the same reasons).
The Presentations at the Banquet  The Banquet and award ceremony went very well (held at the Baht Hotel). Much vodka sculling went on, and also we were awarded Bronze for the WIA Team for both 2m and 80m competitions. We were pretty pleased with that of course ! (The team results are only in Region 3, and take the best two out of three team members results added together. Smallest number is best. I setup a bit of a slideshow of the Mongolian pictures Adam and I took, as well as some of China (Nanjing last year), and some of the rest of the trip thrown in. Left it running at the Banquet and it always seemed to have crowds around it. Also later last night (more vodka) copied a whole stack of images over to their computer to avoid having to email them later (got samba going). Bronze for Australia

Today we hope to catch up with DavKa and NyamKa, a pair of Mongolians who have invited us to visit them today. We are back at the Nassan Guest house. We were also expecting the Kazakhstan team (all 15) to turn up there as well, but of them we have seen no sign (maybe catching a taxi to Kazakhstan :)).

There is stack of other things to mention, but I’ll put them in the last report I think.

Cheers from UlaanBaatar,
Bruce

World ARDF Tour 2001 Part 18

Bruce’s Report #18

This is a quick one !

It’s the morning just prior to the bus departure for the tour day. The internet here has been declared a disaster. Since we have already seen the Lama Temple, and we’re not hugely interested in the Big Department Store for shopping (the market is much more fun), we’ll try to get to an Internet Cafe today instead, with laptop.

OK, firstly some results from the 2m competition: I came 5th in senior, Adam 7th, Bryan with 3TX 19th. The best time was 65 minutes by my Russian roommate ! The best Region 3 time was 2nd overall at 69 minutes by China. Ahead of me are also a Mongolian (3rd) and another Chinese (4th). In the Region 3 team results we think we’ll come 3rd. Mongolia just beats us because there is a Mongolian 6th place (6+3 < 5+7).

On the jury matter of competitors DFing before the event as you can imagine there was much discussion in many languages. All crowded around the laptop screen to ok at the images. Luckily we’d kept the file dates too which were stamped with the camera (in US time as it happens). We presented the evidence and left it up to the jury to decide. Later it transpired that the jury had only 2 members, so they instead decided that the team leaders were to become the jury. Late into the night it was finally decided to invalidate the team results of the countrys who transgressed, but leave the individual placings as it would get messy proving it. Mr Han and Madame Cheng of China were with us all the way since they had seen this before but been unable to do much about it without evidence.

Russian Power StationNow a titbit from Mr Parke, the IARU Region 3 chairman. The USSR built the coal burning pow station very close to the middle of UlaanBaatar in 1969 under a friendship scheme. When USSR fell apart, Russia asked the Mongolians for payment. They replied “We have no money”. After a time the Russian’s decided to take over the power station themselves, and retail the power direct to the Mongolian consumers. A side effect of this is that the Russians have little interest in keeping the power station clean burning….
 

Hopefully some pictures should appear shortly when Glenn gets a chance. [Ed: He didn’t] I’m now in an internet cafe in UB with my laptop connected to the lan there in order to send pictures ! [Ed: Hmmm…]

Cheers,
Bruce