[ARDF] Cincinnati event at Miami-Whitewater Forest, Nov 13, 2005

[Matthew Robbins]

Dick Arnett set a really confusing 2m course today at Miami-Whitewater
Forest, near Cincinnati.  It was fairly short, but I didn't know what
order I had fallen into until I got the third transmitter.  (By that
point, I only had to go away from the finish to get 4, then back
toward the finish to get 2).  Up until that third transmitter, though,
it was nuts.  And this is on FM MCW.

The distance was fairly short, 3.4 km by my order (measured straightline).

There were three competitors, and each competitor did a different order:

Order	Dist, m	% of shortest order

14352	3289	100  (Not a likely order)
15432	3387	103  Robbins
13452	3512	107  (Sort of the "standard rules order")
15342	3546	108
14532	3622	110
14325	3712	113  Frey (I think...)
12345	3783	115
  [deleted]
35241	4570	139  DeYoung (radio issues)

It was just about a perfect day to be in the woods.  The leaves were
mostly off, and it was cloudy, so there was this beautiful diffused
light.  It had rained the night before, so most things had a more
intense color than when they're dry.  It was too cold to stand around
in a T-Shirt, but once you got moving it was just right.

Miami-Whitewater is a really nice place to orienteer.  The woods is
mapped predominately white, with the remainder light green.  The
footing is decent, but not perfect, so it's not as fast as some woods,
but the openness is really welcome compared to some of our maps.  It
is a bit hilly, and for ARDF it penalizes you a bit for picking the
wrong spur or failing to clear a hilltop before you commit to another.

The course wasn't a nine-category course:  It was a find-all-five sort
of course, and it was difficult.  The wetness made the reflections a
little worse than I expected.

The start corridor was North along a road on a spur, and my first
thought was to clear the spur (i.e., make sure I got all the
transmitters on it before I moved on), but since the finish was at the
tip of this spur, my second thought was to check for close Ts, and
then go East to get the rest, and get the tip of the start/finish spur
at the end.  I ran down the road from the start.  1 and 2 were in
front of me, both 2's on my Ackerly radio.  3 and 4 were off to the
NE, and 5 was just this really broad signal with no real peak.  I
figured 5 was near the finish (at the tip of the start spur).  That
seems weird to me now, because Dick had said it was a legal course,
with proper exclusion zones.

When 5 went off for the first time, I stood there looking at my map
for at least 20 seconds while 1 was on, thinking about where 5 might
be.  I was slowly turning my antenna over my head, and something, I
don't know what, snapped me out of my thought.  I looked up, and 1 was
showing a 4 (strong), and in a direction where the map only went 400m.
 I took off running it down, trying to get to where I could have line
of sight down the slope (the hilltop I was on was blocking the view). 
Luckily, I did have enough time, and I saw it about 20 seconds after
it went off, although it took me another 20 or 30 to get to it.

Looking at my bearings, I thought I needed to go NW toward 3 and 4.  I
figured 2 was near the finish, and I had no idea where 5
was---probably somewhere at the far north of the map that I could get
after 3 and 4 on my way back to get 2.

I headed that way thinking 3 was next.  On the way, I got a bearing to
2 that pointed directly back to the finish.  As I crested the next
spur over from the start spur, on to another road, 5 came on, and it
was a 5.  I got in on cycle.  I had no idea I was even close to it.  I
had one hint of a bearing to it, from my broad signal before, that I
had 0% trust in.  Go figure.

I was going for 3 and 4 now, and I just used my initial bearings to
aim for a likely spot.  (I took almost no bearings in the reentrants. 
If it was a 4 or higher I did, but it was really uncommon.)  Two
cycles later, I came out on the next road East and kept going 50 or
100m.  When 3 came on it was behind me.  At the road I had a 6, and I
went really slow looking for it.  It was on the nose of a spur, out of
LOS, and pretty difficult to figure out.  I got it maybe 2 minutes off
cycle.

4 was next.  From 3 I climbed to a high spot and waited for 4.  The
bearing was S of me, so I went S.  At the next spur-top 150m later it
was W of me, so I went W.  It was getting stronger, but it was acting
really funny.  I was following the bearing, and I checked the map for
some possible reflections.  I had a thought, looked over to my left,
and saw it.

I headed back toward 2 and the finish, and popped out on a road.  I
turned right to follow it, then checked my map.  Wrong road!  I want
the next one.  I went cross-county, part forest, part trail, and got
on the right road.   I was thinking, "I haven't seen anyone since I
started."

As I ran past five, my previous bearing to 2 said I should go left
into a reentrant on a beeline to the finish.  I almost did that, but I
thought I should make check the end of the spur I was on just to make
sure.  As I ran (and walked) out the spur-top, I stayed left looking
in each little gully for a T.  I got to the end of the flat top of the
spur, and I waited a minute for 2 to come on.  I had my antenna aimed
W toward the finish, and when it came on, I almost didn't check behind
me.  Luckily, I did, because that's where it was.  I have no
explanation for the bearings I got to 2 earlier.  They make no sense.

After 2 I ran it in, and saw Bob talking to Dick.  I didn't see Brian.
 I ran all the way to Dick's van, and stopped my watch.  Just over 59
minutes.  I barely beat Bob---just 3 minutes.  Here's the way I look
at it.  Bob really out-ran me.  He took a longer order than I did.  I
haven't been exercising enough, and Bob has.  I know I said this about
a course at Stanbery not too long ago, but it's still true here:  I
got lucky with the order.

 I don't know if it is getting through that this course was confusing.
 I find this type of course the most difficult.  Shorter courses are
faster, but the order is less important.  If you get the order wrong,
but move quickly, you can still do well.  The very long courses are
grueling, but the order is often easier because you don't see strong
signals until you really are close, and you have lots of cycles
between transmitters to figure out the order.  This type of course is
for me the most fun and the most difficult.  There are legal zones,
but nothing really more than 700-800m apart.  The terrain took away a
lot of information while we crossed to the next spur over, and the
reflections were, in some cases, completely convincing.  (And again,
we set "get-all-five" courses (with perhaps a few of those forming an
easy course).  I think we'll keep doing it this way until we get more
people coming to our events.)  I do think it's harder to be fair on a
course of this length, at least in this terrain.   I got five almost
purely by luck---If I had been two minutes faster to the hilltop, I'd
have been not only past 5, but so far out of LOS, that the bearing
would've been wrong.


Brian had some radio issues.  He was using a ROX-2 on one of the
normal Leggio TMBs, and apparently there is an issue with the balanced
ROX-2 on an unbalanced coax with hairpin match on the TMB.  Brian said
the indicated peak was about 30 degrees off to the side.  It took him
a while to figure it out, and his order was *really* bad, 4.6km to my
3.4km and Bob's 3.7km.  I don't know Brian's time, but the radio
trouble explains the longer time.

Miami-Whitewater is right next to a small airport, and Brian also
reported he could hear the landing pattern chatter more or less
perfectly.  He thinks it's an  IF image---We were on 144.550, I think,
and the airport is 122 MHz or so.  The IF is 10.9MHz, so 2x that is
21.8MHz.

He also reported it's too easy to knock the ROX-2 off frequency.  We
brainstormed some ways to make it more vegetation friendly.

We're still thinking of using the ROX-2 as a club project.  Brian is
apparently pretty impressed by it.  I'm certainly going to build one.

Matthew
AA9YH
Cincinnati, Ohio USA