San Antonio Hams

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.)

There were 480 riders, paired into 240 teams, but due to the numbering scheme, Lance Armstrong was team #121.  Riders were started every 30 seconds, starting with #1, then #1-X, #2, #2-X, etc.  The “X” denoted a team starting on the 30 second mark.  This event which went up River Road from Gruene (north of New Braunfels, TX) to Sattler, Texas, up FM2673 to FM306, then east on FM306 back toward New Braunfels, and south back into Gruene, a total of 27.3 miles.  Very scenic, very hilly, very beautiful weather perfect for the race with temperatures in the 60’s that morning.

Anyway, there was this “lone rider #121” who kept zipping down the course backwards after the race had already started.  We didn’t know at the time, that this was Lance Armstrong doing a warm-up ride, so it was doubly amusing when we hollered out “Watch out for Lance Armstrong coming the other way!” and then found out it was him.  Guess he did meet himself coming back the other way eventually.

My son, David KD5MTJ, and I were set up in the 3700 block of River Road.  Click Here for link to PDF map of Sunday’s course.

We were on the downward slope of a hill, on a blind curve, that crossed a bridge at the bottom of the hill just past our point.  The bridge, due to frequent flooding, had no guard rails on the side, only a six inch concrete curbing.

We set up off to the side next to a private driveway with permission of the property owners, the parents of GVARC’s net control Mike WQ5C.  Very convenient since there really wasn’t anywhere else to park closer to the bridge.

I set up with a tripod for the camera and experimented taking action shots. I quickly learned that the automatic feature of the camera wasn’t up to snuff with these fast moving riders, so I changed it manually to use the “sports action” setting and then the photos quit being so blurry.

I’m posting a bunch more photos at the end of this article, but first I’ll start with those I managed to take with Lance Armstrong passing by, then we’ll put in the others in chronological order.

Here comes Lance’s team.  You could spot him, because he had a private escort including an unmarked police car following behind. He had a bright red convertible leading the pack (photo left).

The photo on the left shows Lance’s team gaining on another pair of riders as they approached our position.  The photo on the right shows him passing our position.  Armstrong in the lead, Korioth close behind.

His escort left him plenty of space to stretch his legs and pedal,  and they were almost past us before you realized it, due to the high speed they were pedaling.

On the 27.3-mile course, Armstrong, 37, and Korioth, 41, finished with a course-record 56:31, blowing away their nearest competitors David Wenger and Steven Wheeler, both 28 and from Austin, who finished with a time of 59:11.


And now that we’ve gotten those out of our way, here are the rest of our photos, blurry or not, here they come…..