Almost everything that ruins a race day was decided before it. This is the list, in the order the mistakes actually happen.
Weeks out: the event itself
Check the time zone on the event. Every time in Podium is the local wall clock the readers are on, never UTC, and an event judged in the wrong zone is wrong by hours with nothing on the page to show it. It is the cheapest thing to get right now and among the most annoying later.
Pick the age basis — age on race day, or age at 31 December. It belongs to the event and it decides how every age category is worked out.
Build in order: event, races, waves, categories, timing points, entrants. Each needs the one above it to exist, and the commonest import failure is a list arriving before the races and categories it refers to. See Setting an event up.
Leave the race window generous. It is the span the race can be timed in, not the gun, and a finisher arriving after it closes is discarded as though the box never reported.
The week before: entries and chips
- Import the list and look at the column mapping before anything is written. Nothing commits until you say so, and an import can be undone.
- Get the chips against people. A chip has to be against the person before they start. See Where chip codes come from.
- Clear the "Not ready" list. It is the two ways somebody silently gets no result — no chip and no number. A number can be given later; a chip really cannot.
- Print the registration list twice — by surname for the desk, by number for the line.
The night before: charge everything
Everything with a battery, including the ones nobody thinks of.
- The boxes.
- The phone or laptop that will run all day. A phone holding radio links to boxes for six hours is working hard.
- Active tags are battery powered. If yours have been in a box since last season, test them, do not assume them.
Pack spares of the things that end a day when they fail: the dongle, a cable, a handful of tags, and paper.
On site: prove the line before the field arrives
Walk a chip across every line and watch the reads come up. It is the only test that proves the whole chain at once — tag, antenna, box, clock, link and app.
- Do it at the edges of the line, not up the middle. The middle always works.
- Do it with a tag of each kind you are using. A box set for one kind does not read the other.
- Do it again after anything moves — a barrier, a vehicle, a gantry.
See Where to put the mat.
A reader stops itself after two and a half minutes. So a mat you tested at nine o'clock is not still reading at ten. Start it when the race is about to go, not when you set it up.
The last ten minutes
Four things, and a race that has all four cannot silently score nothing:
- The gun is set for the wave that is about to go.
- The finish is named, and named exactly as the point on the box is named. No fuzzy matching.
- The "Not ready" list is clear.
- The box clocks are right, or their corrections are entered. Read the box's clock against a clock you trust — see The box clock was wrong.
And know your link's limits
Three connections at once over the network, one over Bluetooth. If somebody else is already on a box, you are not getting on it. Decide before the day which device is timing.
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