The vocabulary Podium uses, and what each thing actually is.
The kit
Chip — what the competitor carries. Also called a transponder or a tag. It is the thing a box reads, and it is what ties a time to a person.
Two kinds, and a box set up for one will not read the other:
- Active tags — battery powered, and they announce themselves.
- UHF tags — no battery, powered by the reader as they pass.
Chip code — the identity on the chip. It is what the box actually reports, and what Podium matches against an entrant to turn a read into somebody's time. Think of it as the chip's serial number: the competitor has a race number, and the chip has a chip code, and part of setting an event up is saying which belongs to whom.
An active tag from RFID Timing is three letters and three numbers — RFI015. The zeros are part of the code. See Where chip codes come from.
Chip codes can be shown in decimal or in HEX, which is the same code written a different way. There is a setting for it in Podium PC and Podium Mobile. It changes the display, not the chip.
Podium will not guess a chip's format. A code whose format was never recorded is refused rather than read the wrong way, because guessing puts somebody else's time on the line.
Box — the timing unit at the side of the track, sometimes called a reader. It has the antenna or mat, it reads chips, it stamps each one with its own clock, and it keeps its own log.
What a box produces
Read — one sighting of one chip by one box, with the time on that box's clock. A mat takes several reads of the same chip as somebody crosses it.
Crossing — the read that counts. Out of all the reads of one person at one point, one of them is their crossing: the first read for a finish, the last read for a start.
Gate — how long a chip must be away from a point before coming back counts as a fresh crossing rather than more of the same one.
Rewind — asking a box for reads out of its own log, after the event or after a link dropped. See Getting back reads you missed.
Backlog — how many reads are still waiting to reach the server. Wait for it to reach zero before packing up.
How a race is described
Event — everything run at one venue on one occasion, over one day or several. Everything else lives inside one.
Race — one race within the event. It has a window, which is the span it can be timed in.
Wave — a gun. Everybody in it is timed from that moment. A race with two starts is two waves. See Wave starts — the gun.
Category — any class an entry is scored in: an age band, a grade, a division. Results within a category are split by gender. See Categories.
Timing point — a box and what it is for. start, finish, split, lap or spotter. Until a box is standing somewhere, its reads are just chips that went past something. See Timing points.
Split — a time on the way round. Lap — counts laps. Spotter — out on the course for the commentator, and it never gives anybody a time.
Kinds of time
Gun time — from the wave start to their finish.
Chip time — from their own start to their finish.
Adjusted time — their time less their handicap.
On a result
no chip — no chip is against that person, so nothing read can be theirs.
no finish — they have a chip but nothing was read at the finish.
by hand — the time was typed in rather than read from a chip. See Typing a time in.
DNF, DNS, DQ, Query — did not finish, did not start, disqualified, not sure yet. DQ and Query are kept off the public results. See Results and publishing.
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