- Verizon Frontline used all the satellites it could to cover the The Baker to Vegas Relay race
- Multiple vehicles - including a new command truck - were also used
- There were over 3,000 relay runners on the 20-stage, 120-mile race through the desert
We were heading towards Baker, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert when I began to hear voices. Turns out, my Verizon hosts were playing 70s soft-rock classic "A Horse With No Name" on the car stereo as we drove deeper into the beautiful desert that makes up the stages of the 120-mile The Challenge Cup / Baker to Vegas Relay race.
You may not of heard of this race, I certainly hadn't! The Baker to Vegas race is a 20-stage relay race run by law enforcement teams from across California and the United States, as well as teams from countries such as Australia and Canada. This annual race happened last weekend, with upwards of 3,500 runners taking part.
The race kicks off in Baker — the gateway to Death Valley — and continues through the Mojave Desert, across mountainous peaks and on into Nevada, finishing at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas.
As race organizer Rick Santos told us, runners can experience extremes of heat and cold while traversing the stages. He said that over the 35 years of the race, temps have been as high as 100 degrees during the day and as low as 17 degrees at night over the years.
A coverage desert
As you might guess, there is barely any cellular coverage along much of the desert route of the race. To help with that, the Verizon Frontline Response Team rolled out a lot of their toys along the route so that they could offer first responders connectivity.
All the satellites
The Verizon team used all three layers of orbiting satellites to get coverage for the race. This included geostationary links (22, 236 miles above the earth), medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites (which orbit between 1,243 and 22, 236 miles above the earth) and low earth orbit (LEO) satellites (which orbit at 100 to 1,000 miles above the earth).
The GEO capsules can provide constant coverage but low speed links, where the LEO and MEO units cannot provide a constant link but offer better data speeds when in range.
Verizon used both Starlink and OneWeb for its LEO satellite links.
"We like redundancy," commented Curtis Mentz, associate director of the Frontline team, who was on the Death Valley tour with us.
A RINO in the sand
Verizon also showed off a new-ish vehicle. It's a Rapid Incident Network Operations (RINO) truck, a large vehicle that contains 45 and 5G connectivity, UHF and VHF radios, a push-to-talk (PTT) unit, LEO connections and a couple of Cradlepoint modems. The vehicle is used to coordinate connectivity in these kinds of situations.
It's kind of mind-blowing that Verizon shifted all this stuff out to the desert to cover this race. Even more mind-blowing was the idea of running a race across Death Valley — and that soon after, the landscape returned to its primal — and cellular-free — desert status.