Reduced Width Feibot Finish

[Oscar's Race Results]

Took 4th antenna off mats then tested it with fx9500 on porch and 3 antennas.  Antennas are in 1st, 3rd and 5th sections.  Theory is that 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) is plenty of coverage for finish of any race I will ever time.  In addition to concentrating runners, reader gets around 1/3 faster due multiplexing 3 antennas instead of 4.   Did just fine with middle antenna getting more than outer ones.   Getting things like 422, 810 & 563.  Total 1795.

Then tried it with 3 chips still out and only 1st and 2nd antennas hooked up.  In 10 seconds, got 1160 and 746 for chips 2 & 3. Total 1906 reads.

  Then put 2 port FX7500 on and it got 30+% more reads. Even got some of the far chip which FX9500 did not get at all.  In 10 seconds, got 1485, 950 and 257 for chips 2, 3 & 1 .   Total 2692.    2692 / 1906 = 1.4ish.   

Oscar

[Oscar's Race Results]

Saturday, with SU 6 chips (almost same range as Dogbone) with and 3 ports of an FX7500, got 100% bib reads for the first time EVER!  Nice end to a week I fried a 9500 and my many years timing computer.

[Edward Schrank]

I did the same thing with mine. Awesome and very easy to carry. I have used 2.5 m mats for many years with my Ipico gear, and as you said, will work for 99% of races. A great change. 

[Oscar's Race Results]

After those impressive tests with 7500 vs 9600 that I ordered a 4 port 7500.  Following Tuesday, hooked 9500 to power before WITHOUT an antenna already attached.  Guessing that was what did it.  And just lucky to have 7500 coming.  Thursday, new 7500 came.  Old Win 7 machine was taking a LONG time to connect.  Switched back and forth between static and DHCP and still terrible if at all.  After previous ramblings about new computers without RJ45 ports, got a 17" screen with a "fold down" port.  Fired it up and 7500 came up and ran fine.  No idea what I did to the Win 7 machine that worked well for years.

[Patrick W]

That is weird, it should have detected that there were no antennas connected and disabled everything with no damage, the same as it detects the unused ports normally, but maybe thrown a fault code giving a red light...  How do you know it's fried?

[Patrick W]

You could do that Matt, that's effectively what the RaceResults mats are setup like with an active antenna in every segment.  I'm not sure how much read difference would would see honestly though.  I'd be more tempted to split them into two separate mats each with 2 antennas.  This would provide a primary and a backup mat (or a split mat, or an announcer mat, etc) and thus be much more flexible to me.  2 m is much more convenient though for small / medium events, that is generally what mine are broken down to and when I do something larger I just use more than one and pin them together.

On Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 3:36:10 PM UTC-4 mj.tho...@gmail.com wrote:

For our setup we got the 4m Feibot mat that is 8 sections with 4 of them housing antenna.
For all the events we have as a club though for the foreseeable future we wont need anything more than 2m width at the finish line. Is there any benefit to me taking out the blank sections and just using the 4 antenna sections?