The Baakens River runs through the heart of Port Elizabeth. Well I like to think so – it runs through my part of Port Elizabeth.
The Guineafowl Trail as the “Baakens River Parkway” is better know is a series of paths (and yes, mountain bike routes) through the valley once famous for flooding and having the odd caravan bobbing down the river!
HAMNET Eastern Cape, under the watchful eye of Andrew Gray ZS2G decided to put up a temporary JOC and send a walking party through the deepest part of the parkway to establish UHF communications and VHF fall back positions for communications from inside the river valley.
The 1st Walmer Scout Group has the container (now affectionately know as the Jam Tin) which provides a very good base for operations, but we needed to be infrastructure independent as so the GV special was deployed.
The GV special is a field-deploy-able mobile repeater with a number of features that make it a great option for this sort of activity. It has a UHF repeater (complete with 7.6MHz split – not a cross band!) with a VHF leg as well. Operating on 438.650 (as the repeater’s TX frequency) and as a short range simplex frequency meant we could get communications through to the JOC in a number of ways. The VHF leg added another band to the mix and proved the bands are not equal. There were places VHF trumped UHF and there ere places VHF was just not worth having 🙂
We met at the Walmer Scout Hall at 1:30pm SAST and after a brief note from the boss, we set off to do a variety of signal checks before returning to the hall to enjoy a braai and some eyeball QSOs.
Some of the people were mobile and covered a large area of Port Elizabeth from the beachfront inland near Newton Park. Patsy ZS2PTY, Werner ZS2WS, Gert ZS2GS, Andre ZS2ZA, and Mike ZS2MIC were mobile driving around town and calling in to the repeater at JOC.
JOC was manned by Tony ZR2TX, Mandy (the birthday girl!) ZS2AV, and Shaun ZS2SG. JOC was located at the south end of Mill Park Road – KF26TA07UU.
The walking team who made their way through the valley on foot were Andrew ZS2G, Keverne ZR2BK, Glen ZS2GV, Nicole ZU2NX, and yours truly ZS2DH.
After setting up the JOC the walking team were dropped off behind the Linkside School where we entered the valley. The gate behind the school is located at KF26SA98FK.
A short walk from the gate brings you to the entry point for our exercise – the VKE-19A beacon located just west of Dodds Farm.
Various checkpoints were logged with communications to the JOC from 14:47 at KF26SA98FK through KF26SA97IW (the beacon at our entry point) down to the first water crossing at KF26SA97GT.
We then walked up river from pool to pool doing communications checks as needed. KF26SA87QT and KF26SA88KH (could be a campsite here). We then started to climb out the valley towards the north. KF26SA88DL is a good outlook point with a view over the valley towards the third avenue dip exit.
We exited the valley at Dorothy Road (KF26SA79OB).
JOC coordinated a lift for the walking group who were then taken back to JOC. JOC went QRT and we all made our way back to the Scout Hall where ZS2JIM had the fires going. A few interested parties had arrived to join in the festivities.
Among the interested guests was Bevan ZS2RL, Damien ZS2DLF and his family and Wendy (XYL of ZS2SG) joined us.
ZS2G sponsored a lucky draw of a mobile antenna which went to Shaun ZS2SG – well done Shaun!
The exercise was to identify communication problems in the area and that task was completed, logs made and a lot was learned. That said, it was hardly work – we all had fun and the braai made it awesome.
