And this is it…

What has this got to do with the Sean Kelly Tour? well, the Sean Kelly Tour took place last Sunday (August 30th), and from all accounts it was quite successful with roughly 2700 hardy cyclists taking to the roads.

The above screenshot (covering an area of roughly 900 square kilometers) is taken from the xastir window of my home Ubuntu desktop after I got home from the event. It shows the trails left from the APRS equipment in several vehicles (including some of these, these, one of these and one of these), several objects and a few home stations. As the screenshot is from the end of the day, it is quite confused looking.

AREN was at the event to assist Civil Defence in maintaining an accurate location of as many of the three different sub-events (50k, 100k and 160k) as we could, allowing them to more cleverly deploy their own medical resources around the course. Great use was made of the SEARG APRS digi-peater network, and it definitely (as can be almost seen) proved it’s usefulness on the day, allowing the guys in Net Control Tim, EI2KA and Bernard, EI8FDB (see below) to keep both the the Civil Defence and event organisers updated as to the locations of various items almost in real time, throughout the day.

It was a good days exercise for AREN, and best of all I wasn’t manning Net Control!