Discussion: 15th ARDF World Championships

The 15th World Championships for Amateur Radio Direction Finding (ARDF), or Radio-O, were held this week in Opatija, Croatia. Instead of a single open competition as at WOC, the ARDF World Championships has eleven age classes: M19, M21, M40, M50, M60, M70; F19, F21, F40, F50, and F60. Each nation may send up to three competitors in each class. Fourteen competitors from the United States were chosen based on the results from the 2010 US ARDF Championships.

Team USA has some excellent results in a competition that is typically dominated by Eastern European countries. Some particularly noteworthy individual results:

Name	class	band	Place	Time	% back of winner
George Neal	M50	80m	3/51	54:57	3% back - 97 seconds behind 1st
Lori Huberman	F21	2m	4/33	132:13	31% back - 4:38 behind 3rd.
George Neal	M50	2m	8/51	62:54	29% back
Vadim Afonkin	M40	80m	12/57	50:38	29% back

Vadim and George have been competing for several years - George Neal finished third in the 80m competition at the 2008 World Championships, and Vadim has numerous top ten placings at World and European competitions. Lori started radio orienteering in the spring of 2009, and did exceptionally well on what was an exceedingly difficult 2m course. She was one of only six F21s to successfully locate all the transmitters.

In addition to George's 80m bronze medal, Karla Leach and Ruth Bromer finished won the silver medal in the F60 team competition. The team competition is the sum of the fastest two competitors' individual times for each country.

An ARDF race is essentially a score-O; five transmitters are hidden in the woods, and competitors must locate them using only a compass, an orienteering map with no control information on it, and a receiver. Each class must locate a different subset of the controls; for instance, M21 must find all five transmitters and the beacon at the finish, whereas F50 must find transmitters 2, 3, and 4.

There are two different races at the ARDF Champs that differ based on the wavelength of the transmitters. The 2m wavelength is more challenging because that wavelength is much more susceptible to reflections off of terrain, vegetation, man-made objects, rock features, and mail-clad squirrels. The 80m wavelength is a more straightforward competition, but still presents the challenge of locating the controls and selecting the optimal order.

I suggest that based both on the results from the World Champs and on general appeal and coolness, ARDF has supplanted Trail-O as the premiere exotic-O sport. Orienteering will always reign supreme, but ARDF is the new heir.

Since Ski-O is a winter sport, it is excluded from comparison - Ski-O is in a different season than {ARDF, Trail-O, MTB-O, Canoe-O, Beer-O, Donut-O, Burrit-O}.

Hear, hear!

Good job all. Ian--you will earn plaudits next year, do not despair.

And Eddie--it is time for you to join the US squad. With you and Ian at the vanguard, the world will fall before the US ARDF team.

ARDF is much more cognitively demanding than orienteering. Hats off to anyone who masters it.

Good job ARDF guys and gals!

Super fun to see good results like that! (Go CSUUUUUU!!!!!)

What do we need to do to make Burrit-O more popular?

With the aplomb that Ian applies to all his pursuits, putting him in charge will undoubtedly spur adoption.

I've made more than 1000 Photos of the competition...

http://www.ardf.de/Aktuell/Ablage/2010/WM_2010/ind...

Second day was a most difficult 2 meters course I have ever ran. Rain, high elevation, difficult forest and a lot of reflections. I had to win that race, but sometimes you need a luck. I was out of luck that day... Number 3 shutdown for 4 cycles when I was looking for it and it set my brains in "recovery mode".
If not that unfortunate shutdown I would win with 72 minutes time....But.. Luck was not with me that day....I was 50 meters away from number 1 for 2 cycles and did not punch control.... because was so happy number 3 came back I simply overreacted and forgot about number 1 and ran to number 3....
then I found 3 and 4 without loosing any time and best split and had to comeback to punch number 1.... 19 km run.... not so bad, landed at 13th place... I had 61 minutes time when found number 4 and if I would just punch number 1.... I would had gold.
Good lesson and now I have a very good level of confidence I can win either band.
I have my GPX route and can post it somewhere.

I am very happy for Lori and Ruth, and I wish Ian would be there with us... I hope we can recruit more folks in Boston to join our efforts and have some fun with this definitely not so easy sport.

Vadim... You need Eddie. All your prayers will be answered.

Ian, I think that ARDF for the blind was even more exotic. This was the first World meet and was done on a soccer field, one person at a time. Dennis Schwendtner from the USA came in 4th for the men's veteran class (older men). There is a 15 minute time limit. One transmitter beeps until the competitor finds it and then it goes off and the next one goes on. Someone who is sighted runs next to the competitor to stop him or her from running into a wall and to let the person know when s/he finds the control. They are blindfolded in case someone is partially sighted and it is only done on 80 meters so there are no reflections. It's the best spectator version of orienteering I've seen. I would love to try it and hope to not fall on my face.

We put on a blind ARDF in 2007 for Hamvention (Dayton, Ohio), and while I wouldn't say "it's the best spectator version of orienteering I've seen," I did put on the googles and try it, and it is fun. No one fell (at least that I remember).

It requires several volunteers, one for each transmitter, to switch on-and-off at the right times.

If we were doing it again, I'd look for something like a golf course, where you can have fairly long but safe runs on very smooth terrain, but also have hills. Our course from 2007 was completely on a flat yard, but there was a hill to one side, and it seemed to me that I (and people I observed) ran a curved path to the first transmitter.

After that event, we ate dinner and talked about the event. We were trying to think of ways to (1) make it more fun, (2) longer, and (3) easier to organize. We talked about some possible equipment improvements such as (4) a semi-automated system where the observer would push a button and the current transmitter would go off, and the next one would go on (which seems pretty difficult), and (5) ways to make a receiver with channel buttons (like an old AM radio) that would let you leave the transmitters on all the time and let the competitor switch to the next frequency (which also seems difficult because of the lack of a market to buy it). And finally, we talked about pursuing something like this at (6) a conference of blind hams or (7) a school for the blind. (And the point really was to get comments from actual blind people and try to perfect a game that would be interesting and easy to organize.)

To me the problem was that it was a series process. Competitor n needs to finish before competitor n+1 can start. That's fine for sort of a stunt event like this, but not so good for a school or a class. I'd love to see some non-running version where transmitters would be placed around a "safe area" where the competitors could just have free run of the place. It would be possible (but not trivial) to make a GPS device that would recognize that you reached a transmitter (within a circle of 5m say) and would direct you away from out-of-bounds areas (like fences or roads). (I mean by programming those locations into the GPS device, not by sensing proximity to a wire or something like that.)

Seems like the "radio button" idea shouldn't be too difficult. My 2-meter radio (vx-170) can basically already do that; just turn the knob on top one more notch to get to the next preset frequency. (You could have a "zeroth frequency" with a steady tone or something in case somebody loses track of where the knob is set.) I dpn't know anything about 80-meter gear, but it wouldn't surprise me if something similar is available. Having all of the transmitters on all of the time would mean that you wouldn't have to wait until somebody finished to start the next person.

Actually, it seems like having all of the transmitters on a regular ARDF course transmit continuously on different frequencies would be more pleasing as well, but I've never tried ARDF, and maybe the whole timing thing is part of the charm.

It would be too easy if the transmitters were all on at once.

Here's something interesting. I just looked at the optimum routes for M21 and W21 both days, and the women's courses were longer than the men's - day 2 by a long shot when the women were on 2 meters and most of the men were on 80 meters. This was even more so for the older competitors. There is a great analysis of everyone's run for each day. Thanks to Karl-Heinz Schade of Germany for posting the results and Bernd & Sylke of Germany for all their pictures.

http://www.darc.de/referate/ardf/contest/10091517/...

This is all very cool!

I am thrilled that New Mexico Orienteers will be co-hosting the 2011 regional (North America and South America) international championships for ARDF. Alas, as I will be helping to put it on so I cannot compete. :-(

For the blind competition, can the competitors use a cane? If they do, how about using a polo field with footboards? Footboards are long walls low enough for almost anyone to step over. For polo the end zones are left open, but maybe additional footboards could be installed. Footboards on grass polo fields are made to be removed for maintenance. Polo fields are much larger than football fields, by the way.

Here's a photo with a good view of footboards (click on the image to get to a higher-resolution version):

@Una: At this year's championships in Ohio, we had enough "organizers" to split up the course setting work. There were four of us, so 2 set the 2m course, and 2 set the 80m course. (I worked on the 80m course, and I had no knowledge of the 2m course details. I did know the park name, but it's a big map.) That way all of us got in one competition day. I'm guessing you have enough people to do something similar.