TackTracker

Southport Yacht club (Qld Australia) has published the first two log trials from its DUX series online to TackTracker.  The DUX series is run on the Gold Coast Broadwater, following a predominately N-S track from Southport most of the way up the West side of South Stradbroke Island.  

Southport has 20 QStarz BT-Q1000X trackers and is the first club to adopt TackTracker for Navigation Rally.  The club is using TackTracker to run all Log trials over the 2009/2010 season. 

Following a highly successful trial rally on the Broadwater off SouthPort Yacht Club on September 18, the club has committed to purchase a TrackTracker Navigation Rally solution, with 20 BT-Q1000X trackers. 

Geoff has been working with Southport YC for some time, and has implemented a rally schedule editor at their request.   The schedule editor lets you enter all competitors, start times and speeds into the system prior to the event.   You can also match the GPS ID with a competitor boat name so that GPS units do not need to be re-programmed each time.

SYC have been able to integrate TackTracker's Navigation Rally results with its own in-house results management system, which gives them a seamless solution from beginning to end.  We welcome SYC to TackTracker!

Beaumaris Motor Yacht Club successfully trialed TackTracker at the Commodore's Rally on August 9. Both manual and automated (with TackTracker) checks were made so they could be compared. Eight boats carried a QStarz BT-Q1000X tracker (one with two).

A comparison of the results yielded some interesting facts:

• The relatively few manual checks did not pick up many discrepancies where boats strayed far from the course, or outside a checkpoint (or gate).
• One boat carried a tracker at the bow and another at the wheelhouse. The timing difference added up to 6 seconds for the course. The conclusion is that if manual and automated checking is to be compared, the trackers need to be located at the bow of each boat.
• Some boats missed the start gate. This posed a problem for TackTracker in determining their start time. Some refinements have been made to the algorithm to address this issue.
• One boats missed a gate on the outbound leg and crossed it on the inbound leg. Initially this skewed their score, but with more refinements, TackTracker is now able to handle this scenario also.
• TackTracker's scoring algorithm was incorrectly using the travelled distance rather than the course distance in calculating expected times. This has now been fixed.

The updated TackTracker version with the above scoring fixes is 2.21 and is available for download. This version also incorporates some other Navigation Rally enhancements, such as reporting of distances and time travelled for the current leg and for the course.

TackTracker's Navigation Rally software was trialled for the first time at the Clipsal Investigator Rally from Sandringham to Williamstown in Melbourne Australia on June 6. All 20 competitors were provided with a TackTracker GPS logger before the start, which was programmed to log their position and time every second.  No spotters or manual timings were needed or used for the event.

This event is available for free viewing from the Races Tab in TackTracker.  You will need to download and install the latest version (R2.16) or later to correctly view the Navigation Rally and see the results.

The use of TackTracker technology has sparked renewed interest in Log trials, and promises to help revitalise the sport.   For administrators, a rally becomes much simpler to organise and run, and requiring far fewer people.  For competitors, they know the scoring is fair and accurate, and they can review the event afterwards in the clubhouse, or at home online.

As expected for a first ever trial, a number of teething issues were encountered and are now overcome.  We believe the TackTracker technology is a great fit, and our feedback is that this is a wonderful step forward for the sport.

We look forward to seeing many more TackTracker Log Trials around the world!