Last week, Taylor and I were in Joseph, OR for the 2010 Eagle Cap Extreme dog sled race.\u00a0 This is the second year that the race administration used ham radio as its primary communications mechanism.\u00a0 Without us, they are limited to mediocre satellite phone coverage or use of the unlicensed short-range radio services.<\/p>\n
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The area is quite remote.\u00a0 There was some cell coverage in Joseph itself, but just yards outside of the tiny town there is no signal at all.\u00a0 Mountains and canyons make satellite phone coverage spotty and completely sub-optimal, even at the extreme cost it takes to utilize them.\u00a0 Over 250 volunteers spread out over a dozen locations across the 200 mile course means that there is a lot to coordinate.<\/p>\n
The local hams utilized a pair of echolinked repeaters to blanket the area with communications capabilities.\u00a0 The Joseph (Oregon) repeater provided surprisingly impressive coverage for the northern bits, while the McCall (Idaho) repeater covered the southern part.\u00a0 With very few issues throughout the week, many places were able to get into one or both machines with a handheld or modest mobile radio.<\/p>\n
I worked the 1600-0000 shift up at Salt Creek Summit.\u00a0 This snow park at almost 6000 feet could hit just about everyone on simplex and provided a good backup in case either of the repeaters went down.\u00a0 A ham from Pendleton brought his fifth-wheel travel trailer and parked it there for operating convenience for the duration of the event.\u00a0 A Honda EU-3000i generator running 24×7 provided power for the radios, lights, and other conveniences.<\/p>\n
This was the first year that the event attempted to utilize any sort of amateur digital transmission, on my recommendation.\u00a0 I brought a packet BBS-in-a-box (a small JNOS setup on Linux) that I ran at the summit.\u00a0 We also provided an old laptop and radio setup for Race Central running Outpost.\u00a0 I had coordinated with Chris at Ollokot ahead of time to get him going with a similar configuration.\u00a0 Since the primary race communications were on 2-meters, we hoped to use UHF for the packet system to keep interference to a minimum.\u00a0 Unfortunately, we found that 35 watts from a standard mobile radio on 440 MHz wasn’t enough to fight the challenging terrain and long distances between the stations.\u00a0 We had to resort to using a 2-meter frequency, which meant that packet wasn’t really usable except during periods of inactivity on the voice channel.\u00a0 Thus, it wasn’t the resounding success I had hoped it would be, but the scenario was really a losing battle being on the same band.\u00a0 Next year, we hope to give 6-meters a shot, which we think might be a real solution.<\/p>\n
Taylor worked the same shift at Race Central.\u00a0 She put her technical knowledge to work helping them to establish email communications with the external entities, as well as organizing the information that was flowing in and out.\u00a0 She did an excellent job of making the best of the packet system from the “other side”;\u00a0 We exchanged many messages during the race, timed appropriately to avoid interference with the voice channel.<\/p>\n
We were both prepared and hoping for a bit more of a camping scenario.\u00a0 At one point, it was expected that we wouldn’t have the trailer up at the summit and that we’d be in a tent.\u00a0 Thus, I was over-prepared when I found myself sitting in a heated trailer with a microwave and a recliner.\u00a0 Taylor, being at Race Central, was always in a heated building.\u00a0 That area of the state is currently far below its expected snow level, too, which we weren’t anticipating.\u00a0 All of the other checkpoints, however, were far more isolated, with only snow machine access in and out of the camps.\u00a0 I think we’re both hoping that we can participate in one of those next year.<\/p>\n
We had a blast the entire time.\u00a0 It was exhausting, rewarding, and a real break from everyday life.\u00a0 We’ll definitely go back next year, and I’ll be much more familiar with the terrain and operation of the event so that I can have a better plan for getting a reliable digital system up and running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, Taylor and I were in Joseph, OR for the 2010 Eagle Cap Extreme dog sled race.\u00a0 This is the second year that the race administration used ham radio as its primary communications mechanism.\u00a0 Without us, they are limited … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[71,70],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio","tag-ecx","tag-emcomm"],"yoast_head":"\n2010 Eagle Cap Extreme Dog Sled Race - Right Angles<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.danplanet.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/18\/2010-eagle-cap-extreme-dog-sled-race\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"2010 Eagle Cap Extreme Dog Sled Race - 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