April 3, 2024
Adding AREDN to Enhance Our Support for the Georgia Death Race.
The Georgia Death Race is a 24-hour Mountain Marathon where runners cover 74 miles of arduous terrain covering 16,000 feet of up and down.
The Northwest Georgia ARES district leads ham radio support of the nine aid stations along the way. Using Winlink, we provide tracking for the runners as well as backup emergency communications.
This year, AREDN enthusiasts in Gwinnett County decided to add situation awareness to our capabilities by adding two cameras, managed by Frigate, a telephone connection to the aid station and a computer providing access to our spreadsheet for the direct use of Aid Station #6 staff at Long Creek.
Given that we were one of the few stations that had internet access, we provided tunneling to AS #7 at the top of Winding Stair Gap where our Incident Commander, Frank Dean, was located. This provided a clickable link to the Frigate camera feed as well as an AREDN Phone connection via the PBX for North Georgia Via AB4NX.
These portable assets running off-grid on user-built batteries were managed and built by Kevin Igarashi-Ball, W4KIB, who was also taking over strike team leadership of this station. Node and phone service at Winding Stair Gap, was provided by John Davis, WB4QDX, Georgia AuxComm manager an enthusiastic supporter 21st Century Technology in Amateur Radio.
I am happy to report that the staff and indeed the Race Director were extremely impressed with the success of this deployment. In our after-action review, our staff agreed that AREDN cameras and direct access to searching the spreadsheet was a real enhancement to what we offer.
A big thank you goes out to Kevin, W4KIB, who made this system work. We all enjoyed contributing to the safety and tracking of the runners with the added enhancement of off-grid AREDN deployment. Adding networking via available FirstNet service using tunneling enhanced what we had to offer. Thanks for all our volunteers for helping at aid station #6.
Larry Whited, AB4NX, COML, COMT, AUXC
Technical Coordinator, ARRL
Georgia Section