[TexasARDF] Next event

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 08:14:55AM -0500, Mark Bayern wrote:
> The next Texas event hasn't been announced. If you look at the website
> <http://www.texasardf.org> you'll see that shows two past events, one
> in 2005 and the US National event in 2008. The folks (Ken & Jen
> Harker) who organized those two events are probably spending their
> time getting ready for the international ARDF competition in Korea
> next month.

Mark is correct.

I would like to do more events, and now that we've done the USA ARDF 
championships, I feel like we have more experience at putting them on.
Jen and I are members of HOC, and we've been fortunate enough to be able 
to use the HOC map of Bastrop State Park for the meets we have held.
It's the only decent map available to us within a couple of hours' drive,
which is why we've been using it (plus, it's a really good location for 
orienteering and ARDF.)  I'd love to do meets on other maps in Houston 
or DFW, but we'd probably need someone else to do the course planning/setting 
- which of course we're open to.

For putting on a meet, we now have all the gear we need for 80 meters and 
2 meters with a couple of caveats: 1) our transmitter controllers keep time
in 61 second minutes*, and 2) we only have FM on 2M right now.  (For the 
USA ARDF championships we borrowed 2M AM transmitters and better controllers
from the guys in Cincinnati.)  We also have all the auxillary stuff like 
control flags and punches, finish line banners, clocks, etc.

NTOA has several excellent orienteering maps - Jen and I have been to several
orienteering meets up there: Lake Texoma, Sid Richardson Scout Ranch, the
LBJ Grasslands, etc...  Similarly, HOC has a few maps of forest areas
right near Houston (for example, the Stubblefield map near Lake Conroe) that
we could use, except that it's really too far away for Jen and I to do 
course planning/vetting/setting etc.  If somebody else wants to do those
tasks, we can bring the equipment.  And maybe someday we'll have more maps in 
the Austin area.

Also, I wouldn't plan any meet in the months of May through September.  The
orienteering clubs figured out a long time ago that it's a bad idea to 
have runners out in the woods in the Texas summer - better to do things 
in the cooler months.  The O season here is really October-April.  

> Are there any good surveyed areas in the Dallas area for a
> competition? Are you active in the NTOA? Are there many (any?) hams in
> the NTOA?

I don't know of any hams in the NTOA, although they're a much larger group 
than the HOC, so it's possible.


* We have the "new style" Piccon controllers.  The older design had a clock 
reference oscillator based on a 3.579545 MHz crystal.  To save space, the
new design uses a 3.800000 MHz ceramic oscillator instead, and the firmware 
code was adjusted for the timing.  The problem is that the ceramic oscillators 
are only accurate +/- 20% (!) and when we used the controllers in our first 
event, they drifted on top of each other very quickly.  You could go two 
minutes without hearing a transmitter and then hear three at once.  I replaced
the oscillators with crystals, and now they are stable with respect to each 
other, but the difference between the crystal and oscillator frequencies 
means that they now have 61 second minutes.  And the firmware source is not 
available.  We could conceivably have a bunch of 3.800000 MHz crystals 
custom-made, but the last time I checked it was cost-prohibitive.  The real 
solution is to replace those controllers altogether with some new design, 
but there aren't many good sources for controllers.  The controllers
we used in the USA champs were "old style" Piccons, which you can't buy any 
more, and I had to send those back to their owner... :-/

-- 
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker at kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/