2025 Boston Marathon

This story was also published in the May edition of The SPARC, the Boston Amateur Radio Club newsletter.

On Patriots’ Day 2025, I woke up at sometime around 2:45am, not that I wanted to be up that early, I just happened to wake up then. Nevertheless, just after 4am, I was out the door of my house and on my way to a Dunkins on Route 1 in Saugus. There I would meetup with Jim, KB1KQW, the Course Coordinator for the Boston Marathon for the past decade or so and a good friend of mine. Also joining us, was another Patrick, KC1UIT.

From there, we made the trek to a Babson College parking lot in Wellesley and began to distribute some jackets for early course volunteers. By 6:30am I was off to Framingham to retrieve a jacket and then began working my way down course to deliver volunteer jackets to my station and others in Natick and Wellesley.

I was on station at Medical Tent 6, stationed at Wellesley College (right before the famous “Scream Tunnel”) just sometime after 7am. There I met with M06B or “Mike Zero Six Bravo” or better known as AB1N, Adam. He would be my partner for the day along with hams from the nearby hydration station, “Hotel One One Left and Right”, NQ2U, Matthew and KC1UIT. I was “Mike Zero Six Alpha”.

My job was relay medical statistics from the station back to net control and maintain a strict listening watch on my frequency which was Romeo Two. From that listening watch, I would relay observations from H11 about runners to be on the lookout for to my station captain, George, a firefighter from Maine who also happens to be a ham, KB1WKU, although that was not his role this year or in years past.

Another duty of ours at the station was to communicate between us and the sweep buses picking up runners who had dropped out of the race on our dedicated simplex frequency, Romeo Seven.

After a rather uneventful day, which is a good thing, I made my way to W1M Course Net Control in an undisclosed location and watched them do their thing on the various frequencies for the race, which included the W1BOS repeater, as it was known for the race, Romeo Five. I didn’t do any net controlling but it is interesting to see the other side. I was joined by friends from Philly, Charlie, K3CL and Jonathan, N3JEC along with newly minted ham and friend of K3CL, Tiffany, N2TNT from NYC.

After winding down operations at net control and helping to stash gear, we went off to a BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse to wind down and commiserate after a long day.

I was not the only BARC member who participated, it takes a village and if you look at the Groups.io group for the club, you’ll see pictures from other BARC members who worked along the various segments of race, from Start to Finish and Transportation.

All in all, a good time was had at the 129th Boston Marathon, and I look forward to the running of the 130th Boston Marathon.


 Photo courtesy of George Gardner, KB1WKU  



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