Extreme Wifi?

On the last Saturday of April the Three Peaks Fell Race takes place. Taking the runners up and down Pen-Y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Being a rather sparsely populated area, the comminications infrastructure is somewhat sparse, although there is a local (to Ribblesdale) set of wireless access points. These are in the valley.

The problem lies is that a couple of the reporting points are somewhat off the beaten track - near the Hill Inn and the summit of Ingleborough. To deal with this, a repeater is needed to relay the race data from the competitor's tags that they dib into, so that the times can appear at the race HQ down in Horton In Ribblesdale. The point to deploy this is near the summit of Whernside, with line of sight to Ingleborough (8km), Hill Inn (5km) and of course Ribblehead Station about 6km away. Yes it is a long way to carry it, but fortunately we had permission to drive to the bottom of the hill, otherwise we'd have had another 4km to walk from the main road.

Years ago, basically an AX25 network was set up with digipeaters, but they updated the reporting system to wifi. However when you've got the lack of backbone communications, you need to provide your own links.

It worked fine Friday night.... the laptop at Hill Inn worked fine and the one with the high powered dongle on Ingleborough was okay.

Saturday was a lovely day, nice and sunny, we came up and set up the point and then the Sport Ident man left for the summit to set up there and left me to mind it, and of course act as a safety reporting point armed with a 2m hand held radio, or rather two as there were two nets I needed to keep my ear on.

The gremlins hit later on, the Ingleborough dongle died and wasn't being seen by Windows any more, and they had no spare. They did resort to walking to within sight of Ribblehead on the edge of the plateau and managed to upload the data from there. That's quite a walk by the way.

Anyway, I had no incidents to report although the other flank of the hill did manage to have the Air Ambulance out to collect a runner who was injured that side. The weather was good, and my dog enjoyed the day out along with me.

The organisers of the event were www.threepeaksrace.org.uk, the data link was supporting www.sportident.co.uk and of course the event communications were provided by www.yorkshireraynet.org of which I am a member of course.