The Big Map on the wall showing positions of Lead and Half-Marathon Lead motorcycles

I helped out on Sunday at the Des Moines Marathon as my second ARES event. I felt this was an exciting opportunity since the event organizers clearly truly appreciate the help. This is the most operator-intensive Polk County ARES event, from what I’m told. The marathon traverses through a pretty good chunk of the city, going from the statehouse to past 42nd Street, down to Gray’s Lake and back up to the statehouse. Obviously, it’s a lot of ground to cover for radio operators that can’t be done on simplex.

It appeared that race organizers rented about a dozen radios and used Electronic Engineering’s Des Moines 800 MHz trunked system. I’m not sure who the radios were distributed to, but those radios alone don’t compare to the needs that Polk County ARES fulfills. ARES staffs each medical tent, checkpoints, water distribution sag wagons, plus shadows event organizers. Clearly, there is a need for ARES manpower and the race director was visibly grateful for it. I’d be willing to bet that upwards of 40-50 operators were utilized at the event.

A mix of 140/220/440 repeaters were used. The location of net control (in the swanky Splash restaurant) near net control made it difficult to get into the 146.61 repeater, so the DMRAA’s VHF club repeater on Park Avenue and a portable UHF repeater at Methodist Medical Center were relied on heavily. A downtown 220 repeater were also used between a few operators. The 146.82 repeater at the capitol complex was down, so it was a kink in the plans but net control and operators adapted.

The crown jewel of net control was the APRS setup. Polk ARES was asked to track certain motorcycles this year, after a couple of years of not doing it, so the race committee saw there was a definite need for that service. Mike, AE0MW put APRS trackers on the lead motorcycle, half-marathon lead motorcycle, and the trail motorcycle towards the end of the day. It was a pretty slick system (and read more about it here). Mike took the PDF of the course map and overlaid it on the map in UI-View. The map was then projected onto a wall in net control, and everyone oohed and ahhed at it, the race director included. It proved to be very useful.

There was an area in Water Works Park where the runners would drop down into the Raccoon River valley and couldn’t hit the temporary 144.34 digipeater on top of Methodist, and so we went 20 or so minutes without a location report until they came back out of the valley. This could have been solved by utilizing a mobile digipeater (D700/D710) in the southwest corner of the course, but coverage overall was pretty solid.

We were pretty lucky to have cool weather in the morning and slightly warmer weather in the afternoon so there were very few injuries — a few skinned knees — but mostly just exhausted runners. A lot of runners were also transported via sag wagons and water stations needed to be restocked and without PCARES operators it would have been difficult to coordinate.

Already, PCARES organizers are looking at what can be done differently and improved upon for next year. Tracking more units and the utilization of D-STAR have already been mentioned in brainstorming. We’ve got a whole year to prepare now!