Category: Local RadiO

Radi-O:    2m ARDF        “Templestowe Valley”           April 27, 2013

Thanks to Geoff for setting an interesting 2m ARDF in Westerfolds Park. Here are the results:

Today 4 members of the Vic ARDF Group ran a simple navigation training exercise for the Australian Navy Cadet unit in Hampton Park.

The cadets are based at Hampton Park Secondary college. Adam put a lot of effort into making a map suitable for detailed navigation. The idea was to hold the exercise in just part of the school grounds, so emphasis was on fine detail and navigating by features, rather than distance and compass work.

We arrived in time to efficiently put out all of the controls ahead of a 4:30pm start. First was a quick briefing on map reading and identifying some of the features on the map, then cadets were paired up, and 3 groups were sent off every 2 minutes, with a different compulsory 1st control to spread them out a bit.

Here’s today’s map, run as a simple 30 minute score event. All controls had equal score, unlike the more complicated street-O ‘row’scoring.

As you can see from the very large scale of 1:1000, things appeared remarkably quickly, even at walking pace. The quite complex area amongst the school buildings still presented a challenge though, with some teams, including the winning team, the Giant Killers, stumbling upon some of the controls more by accident than good navigation. A line course would have made the navigation more critical, but it also would have got more crowded in such a small area.

The range of finish times showed that the event time was set about right, with the winning team blitzing it in 12 minutes and a couple of the teams not finding all of the 20 controls before the 30 minutes was up. Besides, they had to get back for some last minute marching practice for the Anzac service early tomorrow morning !

22 cadets took part in 8 teams or 2 or more. The 2 leaders, Lieutenant Silesteam and Petty Officer Hine, plus club members Dianne and Pierre, roamed the grounds making sure all was well, and just as well, because the school caretakers started to shut the gates to the Southern Oval area, which would have stranded cadets both sides of the boundary.

The rain held off for the event, despite the earlier heavy rain showers that threatened us on the way there, and most of the cadets seemed to really enjoy the exercise.

Petty Officer Hine had first contacted the club last year through this website about the possibility of some basic navigational training, followed by some Radio orienteering training, which could be useful in general for Navy cadet exercises. We therefore plan to run a RadiO event with them sometime in the near future. This will probably be a FoxOr style event, so the navigational exercise today will be a helpful skill for that.  For descriptions of the different styles of RadiO events (FoxOr, Sprint, ARDF and 5-in-5), have a poke around this website.

However, cadets who really enjoyed themselves today don’t have to wait for the cadet event next month, but can take themselves (even drag parents along too) to any of this club’s events shown on the calender of this website, throughout the year. If you contact us before the event to let us you might be coming we can make sure someone is on hand for instruction/training.

A huge thanks to club members Adam (for the great map on short notice), Pierre and Dianne for managing to get there during normal working hours to help stage the event. We’d have been hard pressed to do in in the time with fewer than the four.

Here are the results: (apologies in advance for name mis-spellings or incomplete data). Feedback welcome.

Results for 80M ARDF @ Wellington Chase

Hope everyone had fun and thanks to all that helped out.

7 JULY 2012

The rain held off, the lemon pie from Marta was yummy, the FoxOrs all ran without a hitch, what more could one ask for the day after the Winter Solstice ?

This was the 2nd event in the current festival of RadiO events we have headed into. A total of 16 competitors competed in the full CombO (FoxOr + Street-O) or had a go at some of the FoxOrs. It was good to have a few newcomers give it a go. You still have to poke some street-O regulars into it a bit (eg. MJ), but they end up enjoying it and doing surprisingly well. Others managed to hide at the start and slunk off to do just a boring street-O (eg. TH / JG).

As well as the 20 street-O controls and 6 2m FoxOrs, I also had one 80m FoxOr you could get before or after the rest, so well done to those who left enough time to fit that in. Ewen, who was the only one who chose to do 80m first, was a bit disgruntled a couple followed him to the 80m FoxOr without carrying 80m sniffers themselves, hence gaining a slight advantage, but there’s not a lot I can do about that. I guess congrats to those who took that opportunity ! Having a street-O control very near probably didn’t help. It didn’t impact Ewen’s relative result anyway.

Those doing just the RadiO controls will score a bit lower of course, but I figured it wasn’t worth generating a seperate category. Congrats to Ian Dodd being the only one to get everything just within the 75minute time limit, scoring the maximum points of 128. Well done to Nathan Diggins who ventured out on his own for the first time, and considering he spent 45 of the 75 minutes quite lost he actually was doing well on the FoxOrs. Special mention should also go to Jenelle Templeton, who performs much better when Ewen isn’t anywhere nearby, and would have done a lot better if she’d got back on time.

Note Sarah Davies, Cath Sheahan and Mike Keen were all just going out to find 1 or 2 only to give it a try.

ARDF Results – Eaglemont Flats 3 June 2012

Report by Mark Besley

A Fox-Or radio orienteering event was held in conjunction with the Eaglemont Flats MelBushO on Sunday 3rd June. Sixteen people took part and enjoyed hunting for transmitters on both sides of the Yarra.

Some people competed in pairs and you can see this from the times in the results. However I should mention that Ian Dodd and Ewen Templeton did NOT do the course together. They competed independently yet both took exactly the same elapsed time. We may have to move to SportIdent for the next Fox-Or to achieve split-second timing? Chalky and Jacinta were enjoying the 3-transmitter course so much that they decided to get a fourth transmitter which explains the extra time that they took.

Mention should also be made of Bruce Paterson who attempted to walk on water across the Burke Road Billabong, I believe he got rather wet but obviously got a time benefit. Tim Hatley first competed in the long orienteering course, then went out on the six-transmitter course, found after two controls that his sniffer wasn’t working properly, returned to the start, got another sniffer and a new start time, then went out and completed the six-transmitter course in a very respectable time of 36:33. Greg Williams brought his two “sniffer” dogs along to help him find the transmitters. They seemed to be a bit more subdued after 6 km or so.

Thanks to those who helped with control collection, packing up and other assistance during the event such as demonstrating equipment usage to newcomers and making mugs of tea for the course setter. Thanks also to MFR for providing a copy of their new map to me in advance of the event.

Despite forecast showers, the weather was perfect for the first Sunday Special of the series – slightly overcast with the sun breaking out later in the afternoon. We set a hageby course on a brand new map (thanks to Adam Scammell from the ARDF group for producing this one!), providing two standard orienteering legs, one 2m Fox-Oring legs and one 80m ARDF. The orienteering legs, in particular, were designed for beginning orienteers, and this allowed the Thomas family kids to successfully navigate around the first orienteering leg without their dad’s help – well done, guys! Both kids and dad then successfully completed their Fox-Oring leg, their first foray into RadiO sport despite a long interest. It was great to see them enjoy themselves.

We had an exceptional turnout today – 37 people went out with control cards, and some of those were families. This was great to see, because the ARDF events often do not attract a large following. While some of the non-ARDF members enjoyed a normal orienteering run on our new map, several other brave souls forayed into the brand new world of RadiO orienteering, with great success! We’d like to mention in particular Steve Peacock and Jeff Hughes, who completed both Fox-Oring and ARDF legs! An excellent first attempt, and we look forward to seeing you again at future events. Bernie Shuttleworth also gave RadiO orienteering a go, completing an entire Fox-Oring leg as well as finding a couple of ARDF transmitters. Excellent effort, Bernie. And welcome back to Jun and Miki Okabe, as well, who ran both orienteering legs as well as completing a Fox-Oring course. Good to see you back out there. Also well done to the Diggins family, who successfully dealt with the ARDF leg despite an intensive workout earlier in the day at footy. Finally, a special mention to Chris from the Newbury Navigators, who joined us for a pleasant stroll around the lake. We hope you enjoyed yourself, Chris!

Congratulations to Bruce for completing the entire four-loop course in 1:10:13. This was closely followed by Gary and Darian, with 1:13:26 and 1:15:35. A special mention also to Denise and Peter, who despite completing their two orienteering legs in different order, both finished within 3 seconds of each other. (Well done, Denise; you pipped him at the post!) We always like a sprint finish.

Thanks to everyone for joining us out there today. Hope you had a good time, and hope to see you at more RadiO events later in the year. Results are below (and Simon Rouse, if you read this, you snuck in without us recording a finish time – if you recall what time you got in, please contact us.)

Click here for a spreadsheet with individual leg times.

Sat, 27 August, 2011

An ARDF event was held on 2 metres in conjunction with the Melbourne Bush O Series event on 24 July. Despite the inclement weather, eight competitors went out hunting transmitters and everyone found some.  Five people found all five transmitters.

A map showing the approximate transmitter locations and full results are below.  Thanks to everyone who helped with various aspects of making this event happen and particularly to the Dodds who organised registration and supplied maps for us in addition to their duties running the orienteering event there at short notice.

Mark Besley VK3BES

With good  attendance (66 streetO and 10 RadiO ) and a nice map what else could go wrong?

Well after some late nights trying to battle ocad to get the map fixed and the weather man on the tv telling us it would rain. It looked like a lot could go wrong. After waking up and looking out my window i noticed blue sky and sun, What a perfect day for an event.

The resualts:

*Please note R2 was removed from the scores because it stopped working mid event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results

Stats & Splits

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

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

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

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

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

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