N5NTG | 
11 2nd, 2008| 
Saturday and Sunday, as the readers of this blog already knew, was the annual Tour de Gruene tour and competition races. See story posted to the MySanAntonio website here…
I couldn’t work the Saturday events, although we did divert a couple of our REACT members from the parade over to the Tour de Gruene to help out GVARC after finding out they might be short handed on Saturday morning. According to news reports, Lance Armstrong finished Saturday with a time of 33 minutes, 8 seconds to win the race along the Guadalupe River on the breezy Hill Country afternoon.
Four members of Hill Country REACT got up early Sunday morning before the sun was up, to meet for breakfast and move into our assigned locations prior to the start of the 8 am team time trial races. Due to this morning’s daylight savings time change, we appreciated that extra hour of sleep.
There were about a dozen or so ham radio operators out on the course that morning, including Mike WQ5C who served as net control of this annual event. The sponsors of the Tour de Gruene reportedly donated $500 to the GVARC club afterward, to help them fund a new amateur radio repeater polling receiver in the northern part of Comal County. (For those of you who aren’t hams, a polling receiver is just a receiving point connected back to the primary radio transmitter, and that increases the coverage area to allow more hams to use the 147.000 repeater.)
