Ashgate Hospice Sparkle charity walk 2025
Derby Raynet again supported Ashgate Hospice with their very popular Sparkle Walk. This is always an interesting event with it involving a large number of participants and being overnight.
Due to the road closures we arrived at about 17:00 on the Saturday, and left a little before 03:00 the following morning.
There was a record number of walkers this year with 3500 all starting at the same time.
For this event most of the communication we dealt with regarded road closures, equipment moving, and unfortunately more medical incidents than normal.
Our primary communication was using multi-network PoC (Push to talk over Cellular) radios, we split these across three channels:
- A controlled net for our members located with zone managers.
- A channel for Ashgate staff, road closures and security.
- A third channel for St John Ambulance, allowing more discrete communication.
It was very common to have at least two channels in operation at a time. These radios provide very good coverage in the city, have good sound quality and allowed non-licensed operators to use them. They have not always proven so good in the Peak District, and don’t provide any location information.
In case of any interrupts to the cellular networks we had our DMR repeater available and were able to communicate with all of our members when required. In the end we mainly used DMR to track our sweep walker as they progressed around the course. This tracking was very useful for the event management, but also identified where we had the least reliable repeater coverage.
Find out more about the event from Ashgate here.