In retrospect we should have taken Wolfback off the roster entirely. The frequency is prone to intermod if you’re on one of the hills exposed to the whole Bay Area. Also it’s useless at Muir, so we just didn’t use it.

There was not a good way to identify outbound stops in TV versus inbound, using the tear-off bib tags dropped into jars.  There were also a few tags that got loose and were found blowing around.

Finally, but maybe not really final, it would be good to be able to give a quick answer to how many participants are still out for a given route.  This should be easily done with a computed value on a spreadsheet.

Gearing up for the Miwok 100K event on May 7, 2022.   It promises to be another fun day outdoors with radios.  After that, we have the Dipsea on Sunday, June 12.

Re: our operations, things seemed to go well.  Few enough stations that pile-ups weren’t an issue, at least in the morning.  My primary recommendation is to refine the tear-off tag method of logging participant arrivals.  They seemed to blow away easily if not carefully handled, and there’d be no backup.  Maybe put QR codes on the bibs and scan them as they come in?  Seems like that could be automated to log on both local device and the mesh file if that method is continued.  The local device provides the backup and a bit of coding would allow easy searching and report generation.  

Parking wasn’t an issue for the first shift, and didn’t seem any anxiety from Park Rangers about second shift parking on the shoulder toward the stables.

I do wonder what happened to Wolfback Ridge.  I tried to get a radio check early on, but that was when NCS was on HT only due to power issues.  Maybe an hour later, I started getting random kerchunks and carriers on that frequency, after which it went silent and I couldn’t bring it up.  Hmmmm.

Living dangerously, we tried two new things for this event. One was having participants tear off a tab with their bib number and put it in a container at each rest stop to account for them, rather than having them line up for a volunteer to check their name off a list.

The second was using a spreadsheet participant roster, updated throughout the day, to enter the bib numbers from start/finish and the rest stop locations. This roster was shared using a mesh node network championed by Rob and, I think, very much appreciated by the organizers.

See event photos in the Gallery.

Muir Beach: In sum it was a good event with relatively little confusion compared to some. The hiker/biker tracking appeared to work. Not all participants wore bibs in easy to see locations, so dropping off a tag was the only reasonably sure way to know who came through the rest stop.
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Suggestion to consider requiring negative rapid test on day of event instead of mask for those in close contact. Improved Intelligibility on the air. Also compounded with background noise