Yesterday 12 of our members turned out to support the 17 mile Ashgate Hospice High Peak Trail charity walk. We provided event communications over the 17 mile stretch of the High Peak Trail.

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.

On behalf of Ashgate Hospice we provided communication links between the finish area and most checkpoints along a 17 mile section of the High Peak Trail.

As usual there were three walks of 3.5, 11 and 17 miles, each with bus drop-offs along the route.

During the event we used our new logging software again, this time on a Chromebook and using DMR APRS in addition to the previously trialed Analogue APRS, we successfully followed our 11 mile sweep around most of the course and as this was all via our repeater we gained some very useful repeater coverage information.

The Ashgate Hospice Sparkle walk is a well known Charity event in Chesterfield with nearly 3000 walkers going through Chesterfield finishing in the early hours of the morning.

This event requires a lot of coordination with multiple road closures, 61 checkpoints split into 5 zones, and a lot of walkers, we successfully provided all communication and coordination during the event from our newly refurbished trailer.

During this event we had our first trial of an all digital integrated planning, logging and tracking system. A few bugs were identified, but the value was quickly seen, Ashgate officials was impressed with the integrated APRS tracking of our sweep walker.