HDMCC Cods & Sods Rally

A lean kit, properly placed

Two months after we built the full rack for Fortified, this job needed almost none of it. It did still need its own connection, though. A pub’s broadband is sized for the pub. It was never going to stretch to a field full of tents, and putting sixty rally guests onto a landlord’s line is a good way to end a working relationship. So we brought our own uplink and built the field a network of its own.

• Our own uplink: Starlink satellite as primary with 4G failover available, entirely independent of the venue’s line. Nothing we did touched the pub’s connection or its bandwidth.
• Coverage placed for tents, not for buildings: outdoor access points sited and aimed across the field, at height, so the far pitches got the same service as the ones nearest the pub.
• Its own network: the rally WiFi ran completely separately from the pub’s own, with client isolation on the guest side, so nobody camping was sat on the venue’s internal network.
• Fair use across the field: per-client rate limiting and fair queuing, so one person downloading something enormous could not flatten the experience for the other fifty-nine.
• Licensed two-way radio for the staff team: handhelds run under our Ofcom (Suppliers Light) Licence, covering the pub, the field and the gate, so organisers were not walking the site to find each other.

How it performed

The network ran for the full weekend without dropping. Over the two days it moved more than 120 GB for around sixty guests, which works out at roughly 2 GB per person, and it did it at a speed people actually noticed.

• Fast, solid WiFi to every tent in the field, including the pitches furthest from the pub.
• No outages and no rebuilds across the weekend once the kit was in and signed off.
• Higher usage per head than we saw at some considerably larger events, which is what happens when people are camping, settled, and the connection is good enough to actually use.
• Staff radio held up across the pub, the field and the gate for the duration. Running under our own Ofcom licence rather than licence-free kit buys better frequencies and more transmit power, and you hear the difference on the first radio check.

What we took from it

Cods & Sods is the case we point at when someone assumes they need the whole stack. They did not. They needed the right three or four pieces, put in the right places, by someone who had thought about where the tents were going to be rather than where the plug sockets are.

It is also a reminder that “the venue has WiFi” is not the same as “the site has WiFi”. A building’s access point was never designed to throw a signal two hundred feet across a field into a canvas tent, and it will not start doing so because there is an event on. The answer is rarely to lean harder on the venue’s line. It is to bring a connection that was meant for the field.

The last of three HDMCC events we covered across the 2026 season, after Bailwood in deep woodland in April and Fortified inside Paull Point Battery in July.