Our club was asked to help with the tour again this year in the hope that we could provide some traffic handling and bring our expertise to bear with the commercial radios. Last year they had very poor communication during the city-wide event on the Sunday. The hope of the organizers was that we would be able to trouble shoot the system so that they would have good coverage across the city.

The first event was the hill climb on Friday night. During this short sprint, club members: Ken, Jay, Ross and Eric provided communication from the finish line to the announcer and starting area. It was our task to relay the current top finishers and their times from the finish line judges. We used our own 2m hand-helds and had no trouble relaying the results as needed during the two races.

On Saturday Ralph, Deme and Jay tested the commercial repeater between the pier and the two ends of the city. This was a brief test but it allowed us to trouble-shoot the apparent reverse way of connecting the cavity to the repeater. Once the crossed connections were in place, the effectiveness of the setup was proven.

The big event on Sunday, which required the use of the repeater, went off without any problems after an early scramble to inform all the radio users to operate on channel 1 not 2. Ralph, Jim and Stuart were present and available to deal with any problems that may have cropped up during the event. Communications were much improved over last year and the organizer was very pleased with our help again this year. It was a lot of fun for all involved from the club and as we had most club members helping out on at least one day of the three day event, it was also a successful club project.