Feibot Mat

[ogtrack]

Question regarding using only Feibot Mat as a way reading reusable RFID tags sold by Agee Race Timing (pinned to the side of the athlete's shorts and not connecting any side antennas, I am curious on what's your read rate

Thanks

Mike

[Graham Hall]

 I make my own re-usable tags in the style if the ART ones, annd us an 8 port FX9600 connected to a 4m  / 8 antenna Feibot mat, usually with the end sections turned up to act as side antennas (I do this mainly as I usually only need 3m wide finish line) - I get pretty much 100% reads.

At the begining of the month I had 679 finishers at an event that I needed to review the video of the finish line (for an unreleated reason) and I was able to tick every finisher with no misses. 

Incidently later in the day I had a couple of tags were handed in by marshals, they were dropped by runners who had not pinned them on correctly - which underlines the benefit of wearing 2 tags, as they both recorded a finish time with the remaining one!

I have had the occaisional missed read in other races but usually it can be seen that the runner did not wear the tags in the prescribed manner.

I couldn't be more pleased with my setup!

[JK Race Timing Systems]

Hi

Are the Feibots using Circular polarisation antennae, I would imagine based on your results that they must do, There is no way that every runner will have fitted the chips either horizontally or vertically 

Best regards 

JK

[Mac]

I found that the Fiebot mats work great as well.  Normally, I use an 8-port reader with 4 side antennas (2 on each side), and the mat in the middle.  If the finish line is small, I will even turn one of the end antennas in the mat up and that catches nearly all the reads on its own.

One BIG thing that I have found is that the Feibot chips work best with the mat.  I have used other chips in the past (namely DogBone Chips) and have never got as good of a read rate with Feibot.  Just my humble opinion.  

Also as a side note on this thread: can anyone explain the lawsuit that Feibot had with timers using the Feibot mats? Is it still okay to be using these mats for races?

[Brian Agee]

I wouldn't recommend using hip tags with only a mat antenna. I always prop up the end of the mat so it reads like a side-panel antenna, and then I put a side-panel antenna on the side of the finish that I'm sitting on. This way I'm reading from each side and from below. That setup works well for shoes or hips, but with a few tests we did with hip tags and just a mat antenna alone the read rates were not good at all.

[Brian Agee]

For road races I typically do "chips on the hips" and for XC races I have them put it on the shoe. On the shoe we've had very good results when using only the mat, but with hip tags I'd add the side reading antenna setup.

[reece.bell]

I love my feibot mats!! I switched to using one vertical dogbone on the bib and I'm usually around 90% read rates. I will flip the end of the mat up sometimes too. The new dogbone chips ( M750 chip)  are awesome!! I'm around 99% now

[Gregory Butts]

I use the feibot Mat without side antennas. The side antennas continually pick up tags in the area. However the feibot  mats do not. I use hip tags and they can put them on either the left or right hip. I put only one pin in the hip tag so that it flops around as they run. The five meets that I’ve had this season with approximately 300 athletes each I have had one miss read and that was because they had their shirt covering the tag.

[David Lustig]

One way to eliminate the 'extra' reads is to throw the chip reads into FinishLynx. If you have a start list in FL, you can easily set it up so that only reads included in your start list populate. I'm more of a track & field timing guy so I use FL, Athletic Live Results and MeetPro pretty much for everything which is probably different than most others on this group I'm assuming.

Regardless...the Feibot mat is very good.