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- On this episode, we head to the hills to support an ultra back-country run. (lively rock music) Hello, and welcome to "The Field Radio Podcast". My name is John Jacobs, W7DBO. And on this channel, we do a little bit of everything with amateur radio in the field. This video I recorded in the summer was supporting an aid station for the Squaw Peak 50 which is a 50-kilometer run in the mountains of Utah. Before heading out, an important key ingredient is stocking up on food for the day. Gotta talk quiet 'cause it's 11:50 at night. Of course, I never get to bed on time, even when there's meds in the morning but part of a preparation for supporting events is to make sure you have an ample food supply on hand at the aid station. So usually, I make a run to the store the night before so I thought I'd share with you some of the treats I like to get. So let's start out here, first of all, fruit snacks. Gotta have that. Pickle packs, just found these tonight. I know I'm gonna love these 'cause I was taking pickles with me and drinking the pickle juice. Next fruit, gelatin. Good stuff. Fruit and oats for breakfast, Kool-Aid Burst, oatmeal breakfast, cheese squares, Lunchables, chips, more Lunchables, tuna salad. It's great. Crown Prince Smoked Oysters. Don't judge me, they're good. Raisins, celery sticks because something has to be healthy into this mix. Apple juice for breakfast, bananas, crackers and cheesy dip, jello, a Utah favorite, vanilla pudding, caramel apple dips, mandarin oranges, generic cheese dips, fruit cups, applesauce, cereal bars, pink salmon, tuna creations, awesome, candy, candy, candy, candy, prosciutto wrapped in mozzarella. These are the victory cigars when all runners are accounted for and your 8th station closes. Chips and old man breakfast, Triscuits and Chicken in a Biskit, Capri Sun, Oreo cookie, yogurt, more chips, and oatmeal cookies, green peas snack crisps, yogurt raisin, caffeine, Powerades. This is extremely important. You don't realize, even though you're just sitting at an aid station how fast you dehydrate being out in the sun so drink up. Homemade oatmeal cookies stolen from the pantry. Sorry, honey. Lastly, flowers. Guys, you are gonna be gone all day on a Saturday in the summer. Buy the wife the flowers. Don't doubt me on that one. You'll thank me. Am I gonna eat all this food in one day? (laughs) No. But it's good to have options, especially when you're going back country and you don't have a gas station that you can stop by and get a snack. Also, this is gonna be an all-day thing and like it's happened before, I end up going five, six hours over my assignment due to lost runners so this might turn into my dinner and my late-night snack as it has happened before. So it's good to have options. You can always bring the dry stuff home and share with the family when you get home. Okay, cold stuff goes on the cooler, but all the dry stuff, especially this stuff, you don't want it floating around your water, getting all lucky so what I like to do, let's get one of these totes. Dry stuff goes in here, cold stuff goes in the cooler, everybody stays happy. Okay, one last bit of advice: never go shopping while you're hungry. Never go shopping at 10 o'clock at night before going on an event while you're hungry. My receipt shows it. Hardly sure why ham radio events happen so early in the morning. One of these years, I'm gonna get that coast, cushy, late morning start, like a 7:30 a.m. start. Anyway, the sun's almost up, gotta get started, got the truck loaded, just gassing up. I only do a couple of these events a year and one of them is, yeah, that. Dropping 50, 60 bucks to support an event, it's quite a bit a chunk of change, especially when they require you, the assignment we have takes a four-wheel-drive truck so you can't really take the local commuter and get away with a little bit of extra cheaper gas. So it's one of the reasons why you only do a couple of these a year 'cause you just can't, it's not about the money, but okay, we're on our way. We'll try and keep you updated as we go along today. Things get busy so there might be a recap video so we'll see. But let's get on the road (lighthearted music) So we're set up. This is a pretty easy setup this year. We got here pretty early 'cause we wanted to get up the road before the runners were on the road because this is an outback. So there's another operator here at the aid station catching the inbound or the outbound, and then this station will turn to our station when the runners start coming back to inbound. So we're just hanging out here and it's really, really cold. It's time to warm up a little bit so we're just hanging out in the truck. We're sitting up on those plateaus you can see here up on this Ridge. We've got line of sight to the repeaters so we're actually running low power just off the truck radio. Actually, you can make contact on HTLs also. Not much set up this time. We've gotta go over zero setup in the front of the truck. We disconnected the truck battery, so opening and closing the door, lights coming on and off, the chimes, all that, not gonna kill the battery opening and closing this door all day. So battery's disconnected to the truck, running on the Goal Zero. As you can see here, I have the 12-volt regulator on there which gives it a nice, clean 13.4, I believe, volts. And because I'm running low power on the radio, I won't have to worry about doing any type of boosting. Anyway, so we're just getting set up and give you some nice shots here of the camp and everything that's going on here with this event. Be a couple hours probably before we see our first runner. (people laughing) - [Man] If you would've come running down before me, would you? (people chattering) - So just looked to the meter. Correction, that's actually running over 14 volts, so that's running nice. So I'm really enjoying this. We got this gold Yeti 1000 at a Goal Zero warehouse sale, and I'm really enjoying it. There's some things you have to learn about using Goal Zeros in radio work and we'll probably do a video on that but it's all about having the right cables and understanding which Goal Zero you have and what its capabilities are of it. So this is working out nice. Got the solar panels on the roof. Because we're running low power and it's a Yeti 1000, we're gonna have plenty of power. And I have my 40-amp-hour Bioenno Power battery and I put four in the back so we're not gonna mess with the solar panels on the roof of the truck. I do have the panels running, charging up my boat anchor battery, my AGM in the back, my deep cycle, and that just pretty much runs the back side of the truck so yes, that's always on. So not much for solar with the clouds today. But as you can see, this icon Mark 2G is a power hog, 1.25 amp, 17 watts on idle. Yeah, so it's definitely not a mountaintop or radio by any means but it's gonna work out just fine today inside the truck. I got my Browning antenna just on the hood mount. And as you can see here from the view, it's line of sight to the repeater so we're doing good. So an easy way I found to communicate with the runners is get these with us. Our landscaping company puts these in our yard every time they fertilize our yard for advertisement. You take 'em, 'cause they have these really nice spikes, turn 'em around, put some paper on 'em, and send messages to the runners. So did you check out the radio ops? What aid station you are. Or that's what aid station they're going to and this is what aid station we are, make sure you check in with radio ops. So these landscape signs you get when people fertilize your yard or whatever, save 'em, and then bring 'em on your events. They're a easy way to send messages to the runners before and after they come in and out of your aid station. - [Woman] Okay! (lighthearted music) - [John] The job of an operator at a station like this for a run is to first relay emergency traffic. Back country events like this, there is no reliable cell service. Help can be up to a half-hour drive back into town to make the phone call. So your columns are the only one in camp. The second job is to log the runners coming into and out of the station. By relaying this information to net control, a large picture can be gathered with the data on where the runners are and the pace of the runner to know if they are overdue. By each station logging this information, the runners are accounted for. As you can see from the video, these runners rely on aid stations for food, medical, and supplies. They run with little to no gear so going lost or off the trail and lost can have serious consequences. Your critical role is to have 100% accounting of each runner through your station. The best method I have found is getting out in the path of the runners and make sure they do not enter or leave camp without you logging them. Some will slip past but setting up a choke point like this helps to not let them slip past you as easy. If you can tell, I'm logging the runners in a phone app. Now, we don't have cellular service here, however, we do have an installed app that can go offline and log the runners' time in and out. In our area, we have some developers who have made this app and they're currently beta testing this where we can log all this information quickly over the phone, then transmit via acoustic coupling over voice repeater using Fldigi-like software. This method of logging runners is amazingly fast. You can send in seconds what would take forever verbally relaying the info. More to come on this app and its use in an upcoming podcast. From here on out, it's just logging more runners so we'll say 73 from the Squaw Peak 50, 8 station 7, Camel Pass B. (gentle acoustic music) (lively rock music)