Performance of Zebra FX9500 4 port vs 8 port

[Christopher Regan]

Timing a race today and wanted to do a bit of an experiment.

So far 34 finishers. The 8 port has missed none and the 4 port missed 7. Is there a possibility that something isn't configured properly in the 4 port? I think I bought the 4 port used.

[Patrick W]

The read settings are all sent by art so your settings have minimal impact.  If the used one is a world reader, wr in the model/serial no, make sure you're on the right country setting.

Beyond that it's most likely just antenna location differences and people stopping their watches.

[Christopher Regan]

They are both US readers and using the same type of mats.  Frustrating

[Patrick W]

💯 frustrating lol.  Other questions on the checklist:

Have you had rain at an event recently or anything like that?  

Coax can suck in water sometimes From the ends and it turns them deaf... 

Have you checked the cables on the poor read for damage?  

Beyond that it's standard if you have another reader / antenna try swapping out to see what it follows to isolate hardware issues.

[Graham Hall]

The other thing to think about is the antennas connected, if all ports are connected with both readers then the 8 port has to have better coverage and twice as many chances of catching a read. If you 4 port is further down the finish funnel and runners are doing runner type things like fiddling with their watch, they might be masking the their chips.

So it does rather depend on what the overall finish setup looks like ...

[JK Race Timing Systems]

Hi

Are you using both mats close to each other or well away (at least 3 meters away)

Get yourself a volcano power mapper. They are dead handy for diagnosis.

Previous posters are correct, art will control the settings of the readers .

One thing to make sure of , make sure each antenna connector is actually functioning. I have 2 readers that a port is dead on and I would never have known bar testing. It was only by pure chance that I found out, I was using one of the readers to encode some chips and it would connect and show green but nothing , no write and no read on one port, all others were fine

It was one of my mai. Race readers 

Now I regularly test every port as part of a test schedule every third race or before any big one

Check yours