San Antonio Hams

Saturday was one of the first organized ADA Tour de Cure Rider Rallys scheduled for the 2012 event.  The event started on the south side of San Antonio at the Texas A&M Campus on Gillette, just north of Palo Alto College with aproximately 156 riders registered.  Rally Riders had a choice of 3 routes, a 15 mile (out & back), 32 mile or 53 mile.  

APRS Tracking of SAG #2

As you can see from the screen shot to your right that shows the APRS tracking from N5NTG-9, the bottom section shows the route.  We’ve put a marker at the split for the 32/53 mile route on the image, along with a few notes.   My van was SAG #2, N5NTG-9, and we covered primarily the longer route, but did a lot of back tracking & delivery of riders who couldn’t finish.

We had 2 SAG vehicles, one driven by David Sloan, the other driven by Lee Besing N5NTG.  Riders had a choice of taking SAG #1 or SAG #2 this weekend. 🙂    SAG #2 had APRS tracking active all day (see above notes) and worked mostly the longer route, while SAG #1 worked the shorter route (and kept much busier because only about 1/3 of the riders rode the longer route).   

 We had 13 Motorcycle Safety Marshals for this event, with about half of them being hams.  We ran a short informal net (no net control per se) for the event, and never asked that the repeater we used (STARS 146.66) be closed for our exclusive use that morning.

The ride kicked off at 8:30am, and the last rider didn’t finish until nearly 1:30pm.  No accidents were reported needing medical care, although we had several riders with blown tires, or other mechanical failures that needed to be SAG’d into finish.

One of the “fun” things I got to do in SAG #2, was have Alex from KSAT 12 TV ride with me, taking photos of the various riders along the route, and some video.  He’s going to create a 30 second promo video for the Tour de Cure event to be shown on TV.

The big ride, the South Texas Tour de Cure, is on Saturday, May 19th, starting in Boerne, TX, with four (4) routes available.  The two longer routes go north of Boerne, the two shorter rides go south toward Fair Oaks Ranch.  Many more Hams are needed for this big event, to cover Break Points, drive SAG Vans, shadow event officials, etc.  Contact Lee N5NTG at info@sanantoniohams.org or call 210-771-7075 (voice / text).

Here are some photos from the March 17th Rider Rally….