Simpson Desert In a SIII?

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Originally Posted by dromader driver

Coop,

beacons are regarded as dealing with grave and imminent danger vis launch the cavalry.

The more polite way of dealing with the situation from a SAR crew perspective would be to rent a sat phone for 3 weeks with a reliable support person not on the trip. satphone and gps are providing the same info as the beacon and may save you being sent the search bill. They can organise what ever you need.

Keep in mind resupply for fuel or a broken halfshaft could cost you a couple of grand.
For your info EPIRB means empty petrol i require boat in some areas of OZ.

Cheers;)

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G'Day Dromader,

I am well aware of the level of emergency required before pulling out the beacon. Heart attack; vehicle resting on my chest; totally lost, alone, and seen no-one for a week and low on water; and so on. I'll be traveling with a club group so it is extremely unlikely that it will be needed (but we always carry it), and while the Simpson is remote territory, there is traffic, so minor inconveniences like a breakdown shouldn't be a concern if we have plenty of water and food (and we will).
We'll be carrying a spare half-shaft, and as I indicated, fuel won't be a problem because we'll know before we get past half our capacity whether we'll have enough. I fly aeroplanes, where running out of fuel before you reach your destination can spoil your whole day, so I'm used to planning and monitoring fuel usage.

Coop

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Originally Posted by C00P

G'Day Dromader,

I fly aeroplanes, where running out of fuel before you reach your destination can spoil your whole day, so I'm used to planning and monitoring fuel usage.

Coop

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You and Dromader driver should have plenty in common then. :D:D

Bushie

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Originally Posted by Craigb

I would love to join you Coop - 2 almost identical cars but I wouldn't trust mine without some fairly major checks and no time for that. I would trust yours though being such a low mileage vehicle and well maintained. I assume there will be quite a few vehicles with your club so while you don't want to be a burden and prepare properly, you still have lots of backup and I would be surprised if at least one vehicle didn't have a satphone or HF radio and also UHF that you could stay in touch with them - still I think the beacon is your ultimate backup for you. I might be a bit biased being an arid zone ecologist but fascinating country if you have your eyes open. I assisted with a govt biological survey back in the 90's and we hugely added to museum records , even discovered/defined a new mammal species! I drove an OKA in which is interesting launching over dunes sitting in front of the front axle! And my experience is there is not much out there that cant be solved if you keep a level head and my short meeting with you i don't think i have met a more appropriate person to be tackling such a task.

As you probably know the big thing with soft sand is low tyre pressures and if you have a compressor to put them back up a bit and give you flexibility thats a good thing and allows you to drop them really low. Also cool moist sand is way easier to get through than hot dry, so if it is late in the afternoon and you have trouble climbing a dune, roll back down, set up camp, open a beer and you might be surprised just how easy it is early next morning.

I would be very interested to hear your experience. From memory you have an overdrive which will only be useful in some parts for dropping fuel consumption. Has anyone ever heard of a rover 6 making it? I will be fitting an overdrive but probably still not much use. I am guessing I would be up against it on that factor alone.

One last thought, has anyone heard any theories about the reduced dune height? I remember in the early nineties that I just assumed the dunes on the Strzelecki naturally had drifting tops then Rabbit Calici-virus hit and suddenly these dunes were stable, the impacts across the rangelands were quite stunning. I wonder if less rabbits has meant less drifting sand overall and subsequent drop in height?

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G'Day Craig,

Yep, would love to have you along to explain all the fascinating ways that life evolves and survives out there. We are going to do plenty of research before then and put together a scrapbook of interesting stuff to help us identify and understand what we see. Will be carrying plenty of spare batteries for the camera!
Thanks for the tip about attacking difficult dunes in the morning- I wouldn't have thought of that...
We have an excellent compressor that we have used on several occasions after deflating our tyres and it does the job well.
We have a "Roverdrive" made by a Canadian company and it effectively doubles the number of ratios available. They are reputed to be quite rugged units, and it's given us no trouble (so far). I also carry the instructions for installation and the spare bits, so if it breaks I should be able to unbolt it and return to standard operation.
Are there any observations I could do to help calculate average dune height? I suppose I could take the altimeter out of the Auster, but I'd have to know the local pressure for that to be of any use ;-).

Coop

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Originally Posted by Bushie

You and Dromader driver should have plenty in common then. :D:D

Bushie

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Perhaps... One major concern is that we presently only have one portable fridge, and the Navigator wants to keep her yoghurt in it. Not sure yet where we are going to store the beer.... :D

Coop

True about variability of rainfall, not sure if you need a password to use it but at least some info is available from a Queensland govt sitehttp://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au
where they have adjusted and modelled rainfall data back to the beginning of records. Records traditionally are always missed and they extrapolate between available records to adjust.... effect being is that for any location in australia you can go back to the 1800's to see rainfall and also given other factors where available of temperature, wind, soil type etc their models estimate how much real moisture make it into the soil and they represent that in growth estimates, standing dry matter etc. Won't rave on too much how we use it but some very clever work and they also have maps going back to the 1800s to see the patterns spatially across Australia. Very hard to predict (and plenty of research on that too!) but it certainly has been very wet in the past and very dry and more than anything that variability is what makes the country so interesting. Also that variability is what makes it so biologically diverse with so many species evolved to surviving the wide range of conditions - so when people say there is nothing out there, they are just not looking hard enough and ecosystems on the limits of a range of resources in general tend to be the most diverse......even if most of the diversity is hiding in seed form for a lot of the time!

As for dune height I wonder what you can do with google earth? I get our guys now to have a good look before they venture out to do work because it can help a lot in mapping of infrastructure like waters and fencing, but there is a 3D aspect to it where you can change your position and 'see' on screen the height of hills etc so guess that works for dunes. Not sure if you can quantify it and of course it will be the last pass of the satellites that they have used. I figure it is a bit like using stereo air photos that they used for the old topographic maps and somehow they analyse the overlap of consecutive overlapping images. Bit short on time as usual but if you are having trouble finding that I can tell/show you some more.