Thoughts from this past weekend

[Christopher Regan]

I had a busy weekend.

I'm a 1 man show and I needed to setup timing for...

1. 24/12/12(night)/6/3 hour 1.68 mile looped race
   1. Arrived before the race even had power. 
      1. Tested remotely once power was up.
   2. Setup a FX9500 8 port. 4 port mat antenna and 2 side antennas both on the same side after the mat. 
   3. Used ankle tags. 
   4. 0 missed reads for the entire 24 hour. 
   5. I monitored remotely and dealt with any issues that came up (mostly arrowliveresults) not fully syncing or needing to resync.
2. 70m/30m/13.1 trail race. 
   1. Same setup with an FX9500 with a 4 antenna mat and 2 side antennas. 
   2. Used 2 chips on the back of the bibs.
   3. 70m I started from home the night before. 
   4. 30m/13.1 I did chip starts at both starting locations. 
   5. Finish line setup had the mat and 1 side antenna on each side. I missed a few reads but the bibs were also all over the place, rotated, on backs. Overall not bad.
3. A swim with the same setup. 
   1. This was bad. (only my 2nd time with water based timing)
      1. Initially the reader wasn't reading anything. The green indicator was solid green instead of blinking green when reading. Had to completely shutdown ART and restart and things worked.
   2. The mat was a horrible idea since it got covered with wet sand.
      1. Read rates were horrendous.
      2. When I had a break in finishers I removed the mat and just used the 2 side antennas. Don't think I missed a read unless someone had their tag under their wetsuit.
   3. Always a new learning experience and overall they had plenty of volunteers to help me get ankle tag #s from the swimmers.
      

Had 0 crashes or sofftware hangs during any of these races. I had done my best to remove any extra software on the laptops as well as make sure I had minimal startup apps.

I've also gotten into the habit of unchecking the Recent Tag Reads and Antenna Performance. I also have no other tag reads being saved anywhere and I have it copying to the backup database every 30 seconds.

[Brian Agee]

All of that in a single weekend? Wow!

Last weekend I timed the Branson Mountain Man XTERRA Triathlon (photos and results and videos). Right after it was over, I booked it to this night time race to help out our head timer with some of the extras.

I will say that the newest update (6.5) has a much more efficient way of writing the 'tag read' and live export data out to files. So I'm hoping that if you were to leave the tag read export on then you wont notice any lagging. As for the "copy database" option, as long as it's copying local (not out to a cloud location) then that should be pretty instant too.

[Christopher Regan]

Ran 6.5 this weekend. 100% read rates at both races. 

[Brandon Daniels]

I'm still on 6.0 because it has been nothing but solid for me :)

But 6.5 looks like it's def worth a try.  Glad to hear 6.5 has been solid for you guys.