The Pocatello 50 super marathon is on the 29th of May and the local ham radio operators are going to provide the communication services for the race. The race is considered the hardest mountain super marathon in the United States and teams from all across the country come to run the race. This year two teams from Japan have entered the race. It’s 51.8 miles long with several big climbs of 1,500 feet or more along the course.

Several of the aid stations are located where there is no cell phone coverage and most of the course has no cell phone coverage at all. Consequently, communications are an issue. The local ham radio emergency services club has volunteered to provide communications from the aid stations to the start / finish line.

The Saturday before the race was the day to check out the communications for all but one of the aid stations. The idea was to verify that we can reliably get a signal into the start / finish line from each of the aid stations. The radio communications are intended to be able to get help should a runner have an emergency as well as to communicate runner status and times information.

There race will start with 150 runners. Not all of them will be able to finish the race. As each runner comes into one of the six aid stations, they are logged into the station. Food, water, places to rest, and some first aid are available at the station for the runners. The runner is then logged out of the station when they leave to proceed to the next station. We will transmit back to the start / finish line the runner identification and the time leaving the aid station as well as the runner identification for any runners who have decided not to continue on the course. The race starts at 6 am and the last runners will be coming across the finish line about 10:30 pm. That’s a pretty long day! Some runners will finish the race in the mid-afternoon, around 2:30 pm or so.

The motto of the amateur radio emergency services is that when all else fails, amateur radio gets through. So, we spent the morning under quite stormy conditions checking out the primary communications plan (Plan A) as well as Plan B and Plan C. All three plans worked well during our testing. The proof will be next Saturday when we will be actually doing the job.

One of the aid stations is located in a very remote area and the trails into that station haven’t been opened yet by the Forest Service. That should happen sometime this week for at least foot traffic. That aid station is literally down in a ravine with steep canyon walls on either side. Radio traffic out of there requires a relay to be setup on top of a nearby knoll. Hopefully the radio relay will work well. Otherwise the relay will have to be a human relay … receive the message, write it down, and then send it along to the start / finish line.

I’m really looking forward to working this race. It should be a lot of fun and we’ll learn a lot about handling message traffic and communicating out of difficult circumstances. Besides that, Number One Son James will be here to be my assistant … and perhaps to get some good pictures of the operation.

As usual, click on the pictures to get information about each photo. Then click on the picture again to get a full-sized view.

TTFN!