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2 events and a praise for Vesa

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Joshua Fraser

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Oct 21, 2024, 10:59:56 AM10/21/24
to Webscorer Users Group
Saturday, we manually timed a paddling event, which was our first as director and timer. We used individual start to assign waves on the fly. It worked flawlessly. We had some issues setting up master/helper device. We will continue to work that out, as I am sure the issue was on our end.
Sunday we used GPS track/time for an urban 50k. After emailing with support, I was confident the mixed results we recorded were due to participant error and not our set-up or webscorer.com program.
I think it is great that with all webscorer offers and the amount it is used, when you reach out to support VESA is answering quickly. I can't say enough about the support I've been given.
Thank you VESA and the whole webscorer team!

Vesa Suomalainen

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Oct 22, 2024, 5:32:04 PM10/22/24
to Webscorer Users Group, josh.mcdon...@gmail.com
Regarding GPS tracking, we have seen some issues where some Android phones stop sending location updates when the device screen is off / in standby.  This appears to be related to Android settings where you can allow / deny apps from running on the background.  When the app is used for GPS tracking, it gets woken up by Android location service to receive the latest GPS coordinates.  The app will send these to the Webscorer website at interval set by you in the GPS reg setup.

Here's an article we wrote some time ago how to keep the app detecting chips while switching to another app: https://www.webscorer.com/blog/post/2018/06/05/how-to-keep-reading-chips-when-android-device-goes-to-sleep.  Different Android versions use different terminology for this setting - on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 8 running Android 14, this setting can be found under Settings / Battery / Background usage limits / Never auto sleeping apps.

Joshua Fraser

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Oct 23, 2024, 8:05:41 AM10/23/24
to Vesa Suomalainen, Webscorer Users Group

Thanks for the feedback! The client was ultimately pleased with the service and will use us again in the future.

Adam Engst

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Oct 24, 2024, 11:18:41 AM10/24/24
to Webscorer Users Group, Vesa Suomalainen, josh.mcdon...@gmail.com
Thanks for the note about GPS tracking on Android. For one of our events, we use the RunGo app for turn-by-turn directions on trails. It generally works well, but people have had issues at times, and I wonder if this Android quirk might be related to some of them. I'll share with our group.

cheers… -Adam

Vesa Suomalainen

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Oct 24, 2024, 5:21:52 PM10/24/24
to Webscorer Users Group, ace...@gmail.com, Vesa Suomalainen, josh.mcdon...@gmail.com
There is just one way to get the GPS coordinates from Android / iOS - by calling the API for the phone's "Location service".  All GPS navigation apps use this same method.  All iPhones and most Android phones' location service updates the GPS coordinates once per second.  But we've seen some Android phones (for example an OPPO phone by an organizer in Italy) report the GPS coordinates at a slower rate - once every 5 seconds.  This is still ok for GPS tracking, but GPS timing won't work.

The bigger problem is that on some phones the Android operating system will not "wake up" the GPS tracking app with the updated GPS coordinates when you turn the phone screen off.  A complicating factor is that the per-app battery-conserving features that the user may have to set manually via Android settings have changed from earlier Android versions to later ones.  You should get similar behavior when using e.g. Strava and Webscorer for GPS tracking.  A good test whether a particular Android phone will work is to record a GPX file traversing the race course with any tracking app while the screen is off / phone is in your pocket

We have not seen any similar problems with iPhones.  On all iOS versions, the iOS Location service updates the GPS coordinates once per second, and the location service consistently wakes up the app when the phone in in standby / screen is turned off.
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