One of the big problems with competition is having someone to do the scoring. You need a geeky guy who knows how to use the GPS download and scoring programs. These skills are in relatively short supply, and certainly almost none of the pilots want to have these skills.

Also downloading GPSes is a big pain in the butt. You have to deal with these clueless hang glider pilots who are demanding of your time. It takes a few hours. You have to have a computer with a bunch of ports.

In the last year I've scored a number of hang glider contests while also flying in the contests. I've used my SeeYou based scoring program (using the OzGAP 2005 formulation) and I've used FS, the new scoring program from CIVL.

At the Santa Cruz Flats Race I had the meet director, Jamie Shelden, do the GPS downloads. I took about five minutes to teach her how to download the GPSes, two at a time (as there were only two ports on my five year old Dell Inspiron 8100) using GPSDump. I had configured two instances of GPSDump to download from two separate com ports. You can run as many instances of GPSDump as you have com ports and download as many GPSes at once as you have com ports.

That worked pretty well, even though Jamie only has a three minute attention span for my five minute lesson. I also had loaded G7ToWin, Maxpunkte and SeeYou on that download computer, to handle any cases that GPSDump couldn't handle. I gave her a bunch of cables and David Glover had a few more for her. I didn't have time (and she didn't have the attention) to teach her how to use the other download programs on the first day.

I had previously setup a folder on my computer to do the scoring after the flights had been downloaded. I had her save each tracklog as an IGC file using the last name of the pilot and a numeral for the day in the file name (i.e., Straub1.igc). The pilot's name wasn't included inside the IGC file.

This worked reasonably well the first day, but we had about ten percent of the tracklogs that we had to do again on the next morning., as there was some problem. But basically she only had to have a very superficial knowledge of GPSes and downloads to do almost everything right, and I could fix the problems later.

To increase her percentage, I showed her how to download with SeeYou on the second night. If there was a problem with GPSDump she now had another option. But basically GPSDump was working well. I was a mile away from here while she was doing the downloads, but if I had been closer I could have helped her with some issues. GPSDump is very good at putting pieces of tracklogs back together if pilots have battery problems, but I didn't have an opportunity to teach her that until later.

I didn't have the opportunity to teach her how to create tasks in SeeYou and didn't have time to do it in the morning after the task committee meeting. She knew nothing about creating tasks on the computer. I did teach her how to display the pilot's tracklog in SeeYou and after a few days she was doing that to check the tracklogs, but this was also a distraction as it slowed her down from downloading. Later she would probably be able to download two tracklogs at once and display a downloaded tracklog against a task definition, but this takes a bit of practice.

Pilots like to see their track logs right away after they are downloaded, but it does slow things down. It's a trade off. It does catch problems right away, especially if the task is displayed with the tracklog. I would suggest doing it, but the download person needs to manage their time.

She was able to download over sixty pilots in two hours, with only two com ports. If there are 100 or so pilots in the meet, I would suggest four to six com ports (and cables) with two download persons and two computers. Perhaps one just displaying flights against tasks.

After two hours Jamie gave me the memory stick with the flights. I was able to quickly associate each flight with each pilot for that day's task. It took about ten minutes and the SeeYou program scored them as I did the association. If I had been on a local area network I would have been able to be in another room doing the scoring as the downloading proceeding. I think that it is a great idea to separate scoring from downloading. The skills (minimal) needed for downloading are not those needed for scoring.

Jamie sometimes got the wrong tracklog associated with the wrong pilot. This was because I created a manual method for doing this, and handling a number of downloads at once can cause this to happen. We were always able to quickly find the problem and solve it the next morning. Still it is possible to automate this pilot tracking system if you use the FS scoring system (or at least part of it).  With FS and GPSDump, the pilot number gets stored with the waypoints in the pilot's GPS when you download them the first time.

I used SeeYou, because it is easy to use, uses a powerful display program (SeeYou), because I wrote it, because I know that it gives the correct results, and because I can very quickly display the results on the internet by pushing one button in SeeYou. But it is a program that you do have to purchase. The instructions for setting up and using my program with SeeYou are easy to follow and allow anyone to score a competition.

FS is a great little free program that is backed by CIVL and integrated with GPSDump (which is also free). It has great online documentation, that will require somestudy on the part of the scorekeeper. In order to use the automated pilot numbering system most effectively, you need to have the scorekeeper spend more time setting up the original waypoint download system (I had Jamie download most of the waypoints at the Santa Cruz Flats Race). I suggest getting most of the pilot names a few days in advance of the competition.

You'll want to format the waypoints so that their ID is six letters or less and all capitalized. Then when you download the waypoints from GPSDump (you can do this from a CUP formatted file, if you like) be sure to download only the ID and long and lat to the Compeo, and Flytec's).

In conclusion, I very much suggest dividing the scorekeeping task into two parts: downloading and scoring. Train a person to do the downloads and then do the scoring later. The latest software is much easier to use compared to CompeGPS and Race. It takes a while to learn it as the scorekeeper, but you can shift much of the grunt work to others.

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