[OZAPRS] Mt Bogon Conquestathon

[Darryl Smith]

Hi All...

As I have mentioned it before, I discovered running about five years back as a hobby, and worked out I was fairly good at it. In 2018 I did my first marathon, and last year did three marathons and an ultra... alas, this took a lot out of me and I am not running as well this year.

I wanted to do the Six Foot Track marathon in the Blue Mountains this year, but alas, I didn’t get an entry in the ballot. So, this left me free to enter another event on my Running Bucket List, the Mt Bogon Conquestathon. This event was last Sunday, and I must say I loved it.

The event is just over an hours drive from Albury, and involves climbing Victoria’s highest mountain. Over the 20km course, you are ‘running’ up somewhere in the vicinity of 1500m, and then need to come done! They use Ham radio operators to do event communications.

I don’t actually have a light wait GPS tracker unfortunately so I was a bit restricted with APRS operations. I did have the PocketPacket software loaded onto my iPhone and it worked remarkably well. To transmit I held the iPhone speaker to the microphone of the HT and pressed transmit on the radio and in the software. This worked remarkably well. I transmitted at the start at the bottom of the hill, at the top and then when I finished

I have a cable to go to the HT on order for future events, if I can find one that hasn’t been cancelled :(

I also monitored the voice communications as I was running. This was particularly useful on the way down as I was not sure if I was going the right way and knew I could call up if I needed help.

As for the event, I ended up taking just over five hours. I was Was hoping to finished about 1.5-2 hours faster than that, but to be honest I really didn’t know what the course was like. It was amazingly beautiful, but was also the hardest run I have ever done. I quads were sore from the downhill most of the week!

I found out today that the odds of doing the Six Foot Track next year are slim, and therefore it looks like I will be back next year. At least one of my trail running buddies look look like they will be coming too!

Thanks to all the volunteers who put on the event... I have been meaning to use ham radio whilst running, and finally got around to it!

Darryl VK2TDS