Saturday 17 April, 2021 was the inaugural St Albans Rural Fire Service Pioneer Trail Run. This is a running event in the St Albans area that takes in the local scenery. There were three courses on offer, being “Pioneer” (25.38km), “K9” (11.07km) and “Wee Woofa” (2.7km) – depending upon the stamina of the owner and their pooch (No pooches permitted on the Pioneer course).
For CREST NSW, another opportunity at designing and implementing a communications network in unforgiving terrain. In essence, a warm up prior to setting up for Convict 100 in a fortnight’s time.
Down to business – RFS briefing at 0700 hours on the day. 
Our temporary radio set up consists of Tait TM8250 radios in a shelf with a RFI power supply and optional 12V source. This equipment is also able to operated as a crossband repeater. 
Thanks to the local property owner, we have an ideal site for the second cross band site.
Once again, the Landcruiser was loaded like a pack horse and it is out the driveway at 0730 on Friday 16 April 2021 en-route for Wisemans Ferry. We all met for the standard cup of coffee at the local cafe before catching the Webbs Creek Ferry.
At this site, we are using a RFI Side Mounted Dipole and VHF-Midband quarter wave ground plane antennas on a tee bar, about ten metres up. The VHF signal from here into the hub site is loud and clear. 
We have had this set up for a while – an array of trusty Tait T2000 radios configured here as a UHF repeater with VHF crossband link. This setup is very flexible and can be tailored to suit the task at hand. 
Our temporary base antenna at St Albans RFS shed is also a quarter wave groundplane which gives a good angle of radiation up to the hub site.
Upon arrival we split into two Teams. The main hub-site was set up on Jacks track with a cross-band site set up a couple of hairpin bends before the village. This system was a two hop UHF system utilising a VHF backbone. Lastly, we set up the radio in St Albans RFS shed and we were in business. We had a last minute request for additional radios, thankfully we were prepared for a Friday special challenge so we were glad to assist. We brought about 60 UHF handheld radios and there weren’t too many that didn’t get used.
The weather tried hard to rain on the day of the event. All went well with no incidents – just how we like it.