Base camp - the potato hut - is where the expo as a whole is organised from. We do not have a centre of operations in the UK during expo.
Shopping for food and equipment during expo is centered at base camp, not least because this is where we have the beer fridge.
Obviously it is vital for safety that we know where everyone is and to ensure that callout times are set and cancelled for every caving trip.
We also have to keep formal, legal records of who is staying at the Staudnwirt Gasthof campsite and when because (a) we pay the Gasthof for every person-night and (b) it is a legal requirement because of tourist tax payments.
These records are kept in two bound paper books which are pre-printed and bound (including the names of all expoers) before the expo begins.
Your next of kin, insurance and emergency contact details will need to be manually written onto your page of one of these (the bierbook) on first arrival at base camp as a double-check that we have the latest correct information.
We have a hard-cover book where we record every caving or surface exploration trip that has departed or returned to base camp. This includes sketched SRT rigging guides and some cave survey notes - in addition to those recorded in the waterproof underground surveying notebooks.
The text in the logbook is typed up trip by trip as the expo progresses (e.g. see the 2017 logbook). The sketches are scanned on the scanner in the potato hut.
We have a hardcover book recording who has left base camp to go directly on a caving or surface trip, when they are expected back and the callout time: the time at which rescue preparations will begin if they have not returned.
Base camp and top camp both have phones using highly-reliable, low-bandwidth Austrian phone company SIMs. We use phone calls and text messages to coordinate callout times for caving trips. See these instructions for using these and for renewing the SIM each year.
There is a whiteboard in the potato hut and another in the Steinbrückhöhle top camp.
These show current important and urgent information: what needs to be brought up to top camp from base, what we have run out of and needs buying (hangers, custard powder, drill batteries...), what has broken and needs fixing, who is planning to come down the mountain. The top camp board also records who is out on which caving trips and when they are expected back; and also promising leads to be checked out in the coming days.
We also have a bike which we use for shopping when all the cars are up the toll road and there are only a handful of people at base.
We have a complex installation of internet-connected computer hardware and WiFi in the potato hut - all running on donated or loaned gear. This is primarily for recording the surveys of the cave we discover during expo. See base camp computers for more details.
See our photo gallery of base camp through the years. We have been at Staudnwirt Gasthof since 1983.