New River Trail Races 2026

Another weekend, another public service event. Being a member of AUXCOMM comes with the responsibility to aid in communications where needed. While not as important as in a disaster zone, communicating for public service events like the New River Trail Races, gives us an opportunity to test equipment and practice passing traffic.  

The New River Trail Races is an annual 100K foot race that our AUXCOMM group has been helping out with for several years now. The event starts in Fries, VA and follows the trail north to Ivanhoe where runners then turn around and head toward Cliffview near Galax, VA. 

The last two years, I've been stationed at Fries Junction. This location is where the trail splits between Fries and Galax. It's also been a hard place to get a good radio signal out of. In the past I've relied on the 1/4 wave whip on my bag radio and usually had to hang up my 2 meter end fed dipole made from coax cable from the corner of the shelter. But it seemed like as the day went on conditions would change slightly and my signal would get more and more noisy.

Fries Junction

This year I carried in a small 12 foot tripod which is repurposed from a photography light stand I found at Goodwill several years ago.  On top of that I used a 2 meter half-wave antenna I was originally using on my motorcycle. This setup worked really well. I was able to run the radio on medium power (25W) and had good signal reports all day.

The bag radio uses a 10ah LFP battery. I have carried a spare 10ah battery for it in previous years. However I noticed upon swapping batteries one day, that the second one would not power on the radio. The voltage was correct and it would power other devices, but not the bag radio for some odd reason. So, this year I packed my 30ah in the bottom of my hiking bag to make sure I had enough power for the entire day. 

Fries Junction 3:45AM

The aid station at Fries Junction is the only one that doesn't have nearby road access, which means I have to hike 2.5 miles in. That means I had to carry the tripod with antenna attached, strap my radio bag on front, and haul everything else in my backpack. It's not a comfortable hike in and out, but it's good exercise.

Byllesby Dam 3AM

Being a 100K, the race started at 4AM which meant I needed to be onsite and setup by 3:30AM. This year I decided to hike in from the north at Byllesby Dam. Last year this portion of the trail was closed because of damage sustained during the hurricane and flooding. This route was an easier walk. While the entire trail is pretty flat, the path from Gambetta I usually take does have some slight elevation change. 

The event was a very long day. As you can imagine running a 100K takes a while. I was able to close down my station at about 7:00PM. Next year, I will probably leave the solar panel at home since it wasn't needed with the 30ah battery. Although I wish that I had my Starlink Mini with me. My phone would report a slight signal, but it was useless and I couldn't even send a text message. I have the T-Mobile Satellite messaging service, but the problem with that is it won't switch to satellite if there's any terrestrial signal detected. I wish they had a way to manually switch over or at least have it detect that the signal is so poor it's useless. Anyway, I guess that's why we setup radios! 

We will see how it goes next year!