Scanning the Airwaves

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 wi...

Sorry, for the delayed post, just been busy with work. It's back! The Marathon is back! At last, we had a Marathon on Patriots' Day again! Although, COVID is by no means gone, it felt good to be back to somewhat normal. Speaking of COVID, this year all Marathon volunteers had to be vaccinated. Anyways, this year I once again provided communications for a medical tent. In fact, the same medical tent as last year although with a different team, well actually, more like the some of the same team as I had in 2019. This year was mostly uneventful, and I had a competent ham partner this time around. The last two times left something to be desired. All in all, a good time was had.

Yesterday, I participated in the 123rd running of the Boston Marathon. Not as a runner mind you, but as a volunteer; specifically an amateur radio communications volunteer. Amateur radio is one of the three radio systems going during the Marathon, operating along aside public safety radios that are interoperable for the event and the commercial DMR radios that the Boston Athletic Association (BAA), the race organizers, have rented for the duration of the event. There are various roles amateurs play at the Marathon and it is divided into four segments, Start, Course, Finish and Transport. Start and Finish work obviously the start and finish line. Course, which was the segment I was assigned to, is split among the hydration and medical stations along the course and Transport works the sweep buses to pick up runners who have dropped out. Course and Finish also have Net Control Operation Centers that serve as the focal point of relaying operations for their respective segments. T...