100% reads, First time ART user
Rivalry Events
Seattle's inaugural Montlake 5K Turkey Trot had 352 runners. We decided to use ART for the first time.
Brian Agee was gracious enough to consult with me to get me set up and ready for my first race using his system. As advised by him we were firm with the RD about their runners wearing their bibs visibly on the front and that ALL runners must wear the laminated shoe tags on their right shoe lace, regardless of their desire to be timed or not.
After the gun start, we set up the system you can see in the above photo:
An Impinj Speedway R420 4 port reader which we connected two Times-7 mats to ports 1 and 2 and then two MTI panel antennas in ports 3 and 4. Our back up reader was a USB powered ThingMagic PRO reader with one port which we attached a third MTI panel antenna to. We actually did have one panel antenna that was waist high in case any runner didn't follow directions and attached their tag to the hip or bib.
Our third timing/back up system was a manual one where we used a second computer to hit the space bar for every finisher and wrote down bibs as runners finished. Fortunately we didn't need to refer to the manual method.
All in all I can say I'm so happy to be using ART software! It feels so good to successfully chip time a race after a few failed attempts. We had timed a few races before using another software that employs a POE (power over ethernet), a wireless connection, and pre-programmed chips. However in my opinion, I feel safer "hard-lining" with an ethernet instead of wifi and also having control and trust of programming/encoding my own RFID tags.
The icing on the cake, we retrieved 340 of 352 laminated RFID tags that were in great shape and can now be reused for the next race and save us a couple hundred dollars.
We also had a RunSignUp account and race page where we published results between finishers and were able to advertise semi-live results that way.
Looking forward to my next timed race this weekend in Portland, OR.
