Training Log Archive: edwarddes

From my office to meet Alex at CSU practice in Wayland where she was coaching.
I met up with a guy along the esplanade who had a really loud get the fuck out of my way bell, and it was nice to just fly along following him. Then I got stung on the forehead by a bee, which was not so nice. Alex pointed out that the bee probably though that I smacked into him at 20mph and was attacking him.
Along the river past Watertown Square was lots of dirt paths and boardwalks, and the bit from Waltham center to 95 sucks. Once you get out onto 117 its a wonderful ride without stoplights everywhere.

Drafting a silly connector that goes between the Peabody School map and Danehy Park. Silly because it is just from base data and is only a single road, but it will do for training tonight.

Connector:


All three maps combined:

CSU training on the combined Danehy and Peabody School maps. I convinced Alex to jog with me the whole way so we got to have fun talking and navigating the whole time.
Tasty Chinese food afterwards with Pia and Ari.

Mountain biking with Alex at Cutler.
I decided I wanted to go mountain biking this week, and wanted to go down to the blue hills, but getting there on a weekday night is a traffic nightmare.
Alex knows all the trails on the west side well, so we had fun exploring her favorite loops (see multiple loops on the island with a really fast second loop, and a few loops of the pump track). When we got to the southern end, I wanted to go back up on the east side of the charles to check out millennium park (definitely need to map, better than danehy, and has some good woods and trials around the edge, and a school). Not knowing these trails we had a few adventures finding the way back. We were supposed to be on the blue heron loop, but their blazes aren't very good. Lots of nettles got us in the very overgrown trails near the cemetery, and we never did find the end of the loop after entering wells ave.
GPX file stolen from Alex, so heart rate data is hers not mine.

Back to Townsend for more testing
I carried all the gear into the new tower site, 400m from the arena, and set up a 30ft mast with the 900mhz radio and a yagi on it. Then it was back up to the ideal radio control location where there was… zero signal. Back down the hill to see how far the radio goes through the woods. I could get ~500m through the solid canopy with a signal but that was it. Better penetration than the 2.4Ghz, but still not nearly enough.
Plan B was rotating the mast and trying for some different locations. I poked around a ton of different sites in different directions trying to find somewhere where there was a clear line of sight, or a hill, or anything that would let the signal through. After lots of test locations, I think I have another plan now that will work, but I need to go back out for another day to test some final 100-200m hops from where the main radio will reach into where the actual control sites are.

Lessons learned today are that nothing really works through solid tree canopy for much distance. You really need to either be able to get a clear shot under the canopy where there isn't an understory, or be able to get clear above the tops of the trees. I know the radios work well in those cases, at NAOC, we had 7mile links that were above the tree tops.

My new plan requires a lot of infrastructure in the woods to get a mutihop link out to an intermediate point, but at least this is out in a remote state forest, not in some place like the fells. No one is out in these woods, and the few people I have run into in the parking lot with their dogs don't venture very far, and when I talk about what I'm doing, they just tell me I'm crazy and go on their way. I think I will be able to have all the radios setup and working days before the meet so all I will have to do on the morning of the race is go plug in batteries and do a final test, and no one will care that there is a 20ft antenna mast deep in the middle of the woods.

C • Scalding Lake 9