CUMBRIA RAYNET GROUP
Morecambe Bay & Bowland
Long Distance Walkers Association
Four Passes
Saturday 19th March 2011
Introduction
Following on from our involvement with the LDWA "Where Eagles Fly" event last year we we invited, by Bob Mitchell the LDWA organiser, to help out with their Four Passes event.
The event started at the Borrowdale Institute in Rosthwaite, Keswick and took walkers over Styhead Pass, Black Sail Pass, Scarth Gap Pass and Honister Pass visiting Borrowdale, Wasdale, Ennerdale and Buttermere. There were over 250 entries and the weather was dry, cloudy but with sunny intervals. Proceeds went to local Mountain Rescue teams.
The Resilience Unit was the User Service for this event and Ewan Hall (M3OLN) County Emergency Planning Officer visited Control, at Rosthwaite, on the Saturday morning.
The Event
A trial run the previous weekend confirmed that we could communicate from Control at Rosthwaite to checkpoints at Wasdale Head and Gatesgarth, Buttermere using either talk-throughs or relaying messages from intermediate 'repeater' stations located at StyHead Pass and Honister pass. 2m signals were good between Rosthwaite and the two repeater stations but 70cms was likely to be unreliable.
The operators for the event were as follows:
From Dumfries and Galloway Raynet Group, Richard (MM1BHO) and Maggie (MM3PBQ), Neil (MM0NEO) and Nick (MM3GWW).
From North Lancs. Raynet Group, Paul (M6PEW, 2E0EET), Paul (M6APB) and Richard (G6ZGH).
And Cumbria Raynet Group, Adrian (2E0ACE), Alistair (2E0BEE) and Katie, Stuart (2E0BKV) and John (G4ZBW) and Jean.
Control at Rosthwaite
John (G4ZBW) with Jean operated with Stuart (2E0BKV), Adrian (2E0ACE), Richard (G6ZGH) – we
were parked up at the Borrowdale Institute with John’s camper van as ‘mission control’.
Styhead Pass
Alistair (2E0BEE) and Katie operated at Styhead and set up a talk-through to Wasdale head
with a 2m link to control and 70cms to Wasdale. Alistair and Katie remained on station
until Wasdale Head checkpoint closed and their day was fairly uneventful apart from a
visit by a large yellow helicopter.
Wasdale
Paul (M6PEW) and Paul (M6APB) operated from the Wasdale checkpoint and remained on station
until the checkpoint closed. The only ‘incident’ was two very slow walkers who
took four hours to cover a quarter of the distance but nevertheless decided to continue.
There was some slight confusion as to the actual numbers passing through the checkpoint;
No.13 never seemed to turn up. They stayed on for some time after the last walker passed
through, in case anyone got into trouble and decided to back-track from Black Sail Pass.
Someone nevertheless did decide to turn back but got to Wasdale long after
the check point had closed and everyone had left – this walker got a taxi back to
Rosthwaite – I
wonder how much that cost!
Buttermere checkpoint.
Richard (M1BHO) and Maggie (M3PBQ) operated from the Buttermere checkpoint. They stood
down when the checkpoint closed and moved up to Honister. Richard took some pictures
of the event – see
below.
Honister Pass
Neil (M0NEO) and Nick (M3GWW) stationed on Honister Pass in the slate mine car park area.
They were mainly located to relay messages from the Gatesgarth checkpoint but there was “secondary” check
point there and they remained until the last walker had passed through.
Conclusions
The talk-throughs from Control to Wasdale worked well with a 70cms down-link to the check point. A talk-through could not be established to Gatesgarth and messages were relayed on 2m. For convenience we used tactical callsigns – Styhead, Checkpoint 1, Checkpoint 2, and Honister and frequencies 144.775 and 433.775.
The weather was good, there were no incidents of consequence, everything went smoothly and I believe everyone enjoyed the day. It was useful exercise not only in setting up communications in difficult terrain but particularly for bringing together three Raynet Groups. Bridges were built between the groups and individuals and we demonstrated that we can work together as a team should the occasion ever arise.
My thanks to all operators who turned out and to Ewan for taking time to see how we got on at Control; and in Bob Mitchell's words "Again, my thanks to everyone for assisting so well and for all being so friendly" - which says it all.
John
G4ZBW
19-03-2011
Click on the thumbnails for a bigger picture
(You may need to "allow pop-ups")
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Gatesgarth checkpoint
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Raynet at Gatesgarth
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Raynet at Honister
(it looks cold!)