Orienteering race (ARDF-O) 1:30:00 [2] *** 5.0 km (18:00 / km) +30m 17:29 / km
spiked:2/5c
First time doing ARDF Orienteering (Amateur Radio Direction Finding)!! This was awesome!! With my epxerience in doing DF work in Civil Air Patrol search & rescue it was pretty easy to pick this up, but definitely took a little getting used to. The signal strength meter seems to be the main key, and planning ahead. Got all 5 controls, so guessing this isn't bad for the 1st try. If I were to do it differently the next time I would get a better feel for where all the beacons are by taking bearings, plotting and making some better notes right at the start from a high ground area (or better yet two high ground areas for triangulation just as I would do in real world SAR) and then make a plan for getting them all in sequence based on what makes the most sense. I was pretty sloppy with my planning and ended up wasting a lot of time because of that... for example I crossed / ran across the map 4 times when I could have limited it to one round robin. Definitely a lot of pressure on you when you only have 1 min to work with the signal you're tracking! And then you can waste so much time when you're down to just 1 or 2 remaining and you're standing there waiting for your beacon to come active again... so using that time effectively so important... as in make sure you get a good azimuth and good feel for where you thing that signal is coming from before it turns off, and make sure you follow your plan and keep walking while you're waiting for it to come active again, and scan, scan, scan while walking. After a while it started becoming second nature to know about how far away you are from the emitter based on signal strength. But I did have a few reflection issues during the course, so that's always a factor in DF-ing. All in all I was super stoked to put these two hobbies of mine together in such a fun way, uber appreciative to OCIN for the great intro to this version of orienteering, can't wait to do it again!