The sun came out for our frolic with sniffers through Woodlands Historic Park on Sunday 5 July 2015.
It was a combo course with bush-o controls and foxors.

Some very good scores in a competitive group. I won’t name names – you can see for yourself below!
While others went out to enjoy themselves or just to do the foxors. We hope you had a good time.
And welcome to Andrew, who set off with a sniffer to learn how it works and came back with all 6 Radi-O controls.

Thanks to the people who helped organise the equipment, set up the ARDF tent and integrate the Radi-O event with the Melbush-O so smoothly! I couldn’t have done it without you.

Suzanne O’Callaghan, course-setter

Report – 2015 Victorian ARDF Championships

Dale Creek (Near Greendale), Wombat State Forest.

20^th June 2015

Where is Greendale and what is the orienteering map?

A call to the Sheahans put me onto Lindsay Thomas of Tuckonie Orienteering Club. He searched his map archives and only found a scanned PDF, then E-mailed the Sunleys (now in Canberra) and Julie sent soft copies. In business! Off to the site to tape some control locations. It’s steep and thick in the gullies so I decide not to make it too serious. Charged and checked the transmitters, No. 4 did not work. Too late to obtain the spare, so the course was re-arranged to suit four transmitters.

On the day it was cold, cloudy and there was drizzle early on. Put out No 5 with assistance from a visiting ham from NSW (sorry, forgot the name and call) who was seeing how we do things. Returned to the start and some had arrived early, so left them to register while I put out the remaining three transmitters on foot. On my return Bruce had obviously heard the four going and got things started. It was interesting to see which way many went from the start and this was an indication of what was to happen out on the course. Basically reflections ruled the day and all competitors traveled significant distances chasing the imaginary!

See where they went on RouteGadget.

In short it was extremely challenging, more than intended… Well, they all seemed to have fun. Dianne and Henk had the best walk after losing concentration on the way back and going the wrong way down one of the many tracks!

Bruce just winning by a small time margin from Kristian. Apologies for not clarifying a time limit. After Tx pickup it was off to the Greendale pub!

Grant Jeffrey VK3KGM

Results

Emerald Map

On a cold wet miserable day a few hardy souls braved the weather and competed in the event. Five ARDF Tx’s and six 80m fox-ors were distributed around the park. Competitors could compete in one or more of the events on offer: ie bush orienteering (several courses), ARDF and fox-or.

Three people undertook the ARDF and results as follows:

Kristian R: 5 Tx’s 32m (also did an orienteering course)
Mark B: 5 Tx’s 91m
Jack B: 5 Tx’s 135m

No one did the fox-or course but 6 of the orienteers had a go at finding the close in control (30-40m away) the teenage girls thought it was cool, haven’t convinced Vic S but others might have a go in future. I don’t think they are as intimidated with 80m sniffers as the 2 m ones. Dianne and Kristian did each find two 80m fox-ors when picking up the equipment.

Thanks to Dianne for getting up at an unearthly hour to help put out the Tx’s.

Map attached.

Sat, 22 November, 2014

Well the Night-RadiO was an unexpected success.

It wasn’t officially on our event calender till recently, but without the healthy number of 10 RadiO competitors, the Night-O champs would have looked a bit lean, with only 25 Bush-O-only competitors (including two visiting Czech competitors who turned up very late).

The weather presented mild temperatures, but with periodic rain showers, and a particularly heavy shower just before the 12 midnight deadline. This caught a couple of competitors out, and Dennis, who could no longer read his map, made a call back to base for directions home !

The RadiO event consisted of 4 2m ARDF transmitters on 145.3MHz, and 6 2m FoxOrs on 145.7Mhz. The FoxOr circles were not marked on the map, except the competitors were alerted that at 6 of the normal Bush-O controls, a FoxOr could be heard. I just didn’t say which 6 !

There were 33 Bush-O controls, but I wasn’t cruel, and all but one of the FoxOrs were near Bush-O controls near the start, many inside the ARDF 750m exclusion circle.

The Bush-O controls scored between 20 and 80 points each in the 3 hour score event, the FoxOrs 100 points each, and each ARDF Tx 150 points.

The time was 3 hours, and started on-time at 9pm.

Originally I had intended there to be 5 of each ARDF and FoxOrs, but unfortunately the battery in TX#4 was terminally dead. I deduced this was due to a key-switch which had become loose, and therefore the TX possibly wasn’t turned off after an event sometime. All fixed now, but a lot of stuffing about on the night to determine it was not gonna be a goer. I also had issues with the internally soldered connections in the TX#2 turnstile antenna, but was able to make a temporary repair for the night. Also fixed now. Due to the lack of one of the ARDF’s I added in another FoxOr.

Thanks to all those who went out again after midnight to pick up a couple of RadiO controls each !

Thanks also to Henk & Di for the lunch on Sunday of pancakes with strawberries and maple syrup. Yum !

Here are the results:

http://eventor.orienteering.asn.au/Events/ResultList?eventId=1348&groupBy=EventClass

The RadiO results are under Junior Male for some weirdo Eventor reason (might even be changed to RadiO by the time you view them).

Congrats to Kristian, the winner of the chocolate bar, even beating Simon’s Bush-O score (but then, the RadiO scoring was a bit biassed!). Also specials mentions to Grant and Mark taking out the minor placings with commendable scores. It was interesting to note the different score gathering strategies, with different balances of the 3 options (ARDF, FoxOr and the higher-scoring Bush-O’s).

People seemed to enjoy the event format, despite the plethora of things to do and keep in mind. Discussions afterwards indicated it was really good practice for keeping map contact, or relocating again if you lost it, as you had to know where you were to find the Bush-O controls. This is a good idea for ARDF, allowing your bearings to have an accurate start point. In normal ARDF you can normally muddle through if you don’t keep map contact, but this event didn’t allow you to do that (too much….).

Oh, and the two Czech competitors who went out to try some Night-O (with borrowed head-light and southern hemisphere compasses) ? They knew all about Radio orienteering of course. “There are a whole group of them in the next town over from where we live; they often participate in normal orienteering events with us too”.

Note for next night event … get some more reflective tape to replace the missing strips.

Father’s Day 2014 dawned crisp and blue and sunny, with not a breath of wind and not a cloud in the sky. On any other day, we would have anticipated a huge turnout, particularly as Wattle Park is in a prime location in the Eastern Suburbs, but given it was Father’s Day with all those associated family commitments, we weren’t really expecting large numbers.

Well. Were we mistaken. As the last competitor (Peter Maloney) showed up just before midday and got handed a non-cardboard score card and sprint course hastily hand-drawn on a blank map, we looked down at our attendance sheet and noticed that we’d had more than 50 competitors (some with families) turn up!

Luckily it was just the one map and control card that we were short, and Peter is a regular ARDF competitor so took it all in his stride.

We hope everyone enjoyed themselves – certainly all the kids were smiling, and there weren’t too many grumbles (that the course setters heard, anyway) about control placement, which is always a relief when you’re setting multiple loops. Also all the equipment behaved and no transmitters were stolen, so basically, I’d call this a successful day.

Thanks to Geoff for the use of his maps, to Pierre, for co-setting and running this one and putting out transmitters with me this morning, and also to my long-suffering partner David who programmed up and battery-checked all the Fox-Ors and helped me put out plate controls on Saturday evening. Also to Fitzel, because he has fleas.

OK. Enough waffle. Here are some results.

Sprint Loop

This was a short (about 2.2km straight line distance) line course set in the eastern end of Wattle Park. Ian Dodd pointed out that there was an easy cheat’s way to shorten one’s distance on this one, given we weren’t using SI controls. In my naivete, I didn’t even think that this would be a problem, and I’d like to think that given the relaxed nature of the day and the cheerfulness of the competitors, this didn’t happen.

Scatter Loop

We used the usual Wattle Park street map for this loop, scaled it down to be the same as the sprint map and hacked off a small corner to create a scatter course which was not too long. It’s surprisingly difficult to create interesting, short scatter courses! Hope we succeeded. Competitors had the choice of doing all 12 controls for a distance that I measured at 3.3km, or 6 out of the 12 controls for a distance of about 2km.

Fox-Or Loop

The Fox-Or loop took in the western part of the park, with all those lovely hills. Straight line distance for the lot was about 1.7km. It was predominantly our regulars who tried this loop, but we roped in a few newcomers as well. Congratulations to Deb for finding her chosen 3 transmitters, and to Sandy who said she’d give it a try, and came back in good time with all Txs under her belt!

ARDF Loop

In a park as small and open as this one, we weren’t able to have the flags as visible as we would have liked, but despite this, the only complaint we got was that the flags did not match the Tx numbers. Whoops… Yes, we did notice this as we were putting them out. But then we decided we couldn’t be bothered going back and changing the flags over. (Come on, early on a Sunday morning…)

We saw a bit of a change in the results for this leg; where previously speedsters Tim and Ian were vying for winning places, in this leg our more experienced ARDFers demanded a bite of the action. Congratulations to Kristian for winning this loop (despite the dodgy flag numbering), although it was a bit mean of you to give your mate Orry the slip so close to the end! Particular credit, also, to David and Peter who, despite walking, found all five controls with minimal fuss, and only a couple of minutes more slowly than Kristian had. Sometimes accuracy beats running ability – excellent effort, boys! Good work also to Greg, who found three Txs, and Lara and Paul who gave it a go and picked up two.

The Battlers

The beauty of this CombO course is that people can come and try whatever loops they want – I think that’s what makes it such a popular event with both orienteers and ARDFers alike. But a special mention, I think, is absolutely necessary for those people who put in the effort to try every single leg. So without further ado, here are those brave souls who took on all four loops on offer. (Particular credit to Mark who, every time he came back, informed us that he needed to go home to get to a Father’s Day event… and then proceeded to go and try the next leg anyway!)

Congratulations to Tim Hatley, our overall winner!

PS. Kudos to this nice online Excel-to-HTML converter, which produces clean HTML tables without all the crappy formatting stuff Excel tries to stick in when you save as HTML from it: ~link~

Results of the RadiO CombO Score event held at Pound Bend:

1. Bruce Paterson 330 points

2. Ian Dodd 330

3. Ewen Templeton 300

4. Peter Maloney 250

5. Greg Williams 230

6. Suzanne O’Callaghan 190

7. Jack Bramham 180

8. Tim Hatley 90

9. Jenelle Templeton 0

We have plenty of maps left over, so if you want to run a training event there sometime (using virtual controls), let Mike Hubbert know.

A fairly unofficial ARDF sprint event on 2m was held this  morning, after the night orienteering events at the You Yangs. It was set around the delightful camping area.

I had problems with TX#3 behaving oddly and crapping over other cycles, so I left it out of this event. I think I may have mis-programmed it (some time ago) somehow !

5 hardy souls had a go, with Dennis H coming in from nearby (apologies about the locked gate!) just for the event. Congrats to Suzanne, who I imagine will be surprised she won overall.

Here are the results:

A few things to improve on:

• We could try 20 sec on time (1:40 cycle time) to phase people into the shorter cycles
• More work needs to be done on TX clock sync adjustment. I had problems with TXs drifting their timeslot and encroaching on others.
• Better packaging. I think one reset itself by being bumped.

Full Course

Brue Paterson                   5/5Tx         57 min

Ian Dodd                             4*/5Tx         112min

Dianne Shalder                 4*/5Tx         118min

(* identified  Tx off map)

Short Course

Peter Maloney                  3/3Tx         61min

Suzanne O’Callaghan      3/3tx          73min

Will Krincevski                  2/3Tx         74min

Jeff Hughes                        0/3Tx         68min

This event was run in conjunction with an Orienteering event set by Ewen Templeton in neighboring Candle Bark Park and sharing the same finish zone in Westerfolds Park.

The day started with a misfire of Tx3. After setting all TX’s in position, I returned to the start tent to find that Tx3 had gone out of sync. A quick bike ride back to reset it and we were ready to start.

Bruce P. was the first to head out and returned in very good time. Quick to inform me that TX4 was off the map. I checked the GPS readings and yes, it was well off the map. I should have twigged when I rode over a foot bridge with lots of water under it. My apologies to the full course hunters.

Ian D. set out much later and also discovered my foe-par. This resulted in an extended search time, because he did not believe TX4 could be off the map.

Dianne S. had a successful day. Returning with 5Tx’s on her score card, after experiencing some technical difficulties at the start with battery issues.

Suzanne O. was keen to get going. Returning with successfully finding all 3tx’s in time.

Peter M. had a false start, returning with equipment failure early. This was quickly rectified with a new battery and Peter set off again. This time he returned triumphant with all 3 TX’s on the card.

Will Krincevski, approached the course with a lot of enthusiasm and after a little coaching from Bruce, set of solo to locate Tx3. “Will” returned with lots of co-ordinates marked on his map, which were all very close to the location TX3. Well done “Will”. Hope to see you out there again.

Jeff H. had some exercise walking around the park. Unfortunately the score card did not reflect the effort spent. Better luck next time Jeff.

Doug C. turned up with Birthday cake in hand as we were dismantling the course. Thanks for retrieving TX1 & Tx3.

Thanks to all who assisted with the day’s event.

Dennis Haustorfer (vk3bqz)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valley Reserve CombO Event 13 July 2013

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

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

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

ARDF Sprint Results

So on late Saturday afternoon it wasn’t looking too good. The weather forecast for Sunday was OK but dubious and it was pelting down rain at the time. One had pulled out due to ill health (something about a door, but I couldn’t get a handle on it) and the numbers were looking a bit miserly already.

Still, the day dawned clear and sunny (yes, I did actually have to see the dawn this morning) but cold with frost dampened grass and dripping fronds to increase my early morning enjoyment. I picked up the fixed-up antenna squid poles (thanks Gary) already running behind schedule, as per usual. Still, transmitter deployment went fairly smoothly, except at the end I had to retrace steps to TX#3 as it seemed to have somehow got itself out of sequence. Luckily it wasn’t far from the start and I detected the clash before I got back. I was surprised to come across grazing horses in the open paddock marked as ‘white’ (forest) on the map where I had planned to place TX#2, but with ARDF it’s easy to tweak things at the last moment and I found a suitably forested paddock (incidentally part coloured ‘orange’ (open ground) on the map) nearby. All TX’s can be heard from the start. Phew !

Ewen and Jack turned up early, so with only a moderate amount of faffing I was able to send them on their way, shortly followed by Henk. Now who else was going to show ?  I certainly wasn’t expecting Peter yet, but figured he’d turn up sometime about midday (he actually beat that by 10 minutes). As it turns out I had 9 competitors, and 1 extra (Dennis M) who volunteered to pickup one of the transmitters afterwards.

The course, shown below, cunning arranged TX#3 and TX#2 to be in line from the start, and the same trick with TX#5 and TX#4, so the initial optimum order wasn’t obvious, and it was a bit more difficult for the full course competitors to get good cross bearings for the 2 distant transmitters. Short course competitors were told in advance the 2 distant transmitters (there was ‘even’ a way to memorise which ones), but were limited to 80 minutes, whereas the full course competitors had a 100 minute time limit. Late penalties applied rather then instant disqualification (so easier to use the simple OR program setup as a score event) with the penalties for the short course being much less severe.

There was also a fair bit of discussion about RadiO with quite a few orienteers doing the MelBushO, including an Amateur. Lets hope we see some giving it a try, at least, at a future event.

Results below !

Well done to Ian, a relative newcomer to ARDF, taking out the full ARDF course. Noone had enough time to fit in TX#4. Darian ran well to the physically challenging TX#5 (the map doesn’t do the ‘jungle’ terrain justice in this area, and the course setter had no idea how bad it was!) to take out the short course.

Results

ARDF Full (5 TX – 100 mins)

Note: Each TX, including Homing beacon, assigned 10 points. Penalty 10 pts/min

ARDF Short    (3 TX - 80 mins)

Note: Each TX, including Homing beacon, assigned 10 points. Penalty 3 pts/min

Splits

ARDF Full           

ARDF Short