Every EchoActive Plus has Bluetooth Low Energy, and it does three separate jobs: it reaches a PC through a dongle, it talks straight to a phone, and it lets boxes cover one timing point between them. Each one removes something you would otherwise have to carry.
Built into every box · the dongle is the only thing you would ever add
The problem it solves
Ethernet means a cable run and usually a switch. 4G means coverage and a plan. Both are fine at a finish line you control, and both are a nuisance at a split three kilometres out.
Bluetooth needs neither, and it is already in the box.
To a dongle, to a phone, or box to box. No infrastructure at all.
DHCP or a static address, straight onto the venue network.
Optional modem. Reads land in Podium while the race is still running.
The one accessory. Puts boxes on a PC with no network at all.
Three jobs, three shapes
Worth keeping them apart, because they solve different problems and only one of them is a relay.
To a PC
The dongleA USB dongle in the timing PC. The boxes find it, and the reads arrive as though they were plugged in.
$50 AUD, excludes GST Add to cart →
To a phone or tablet
Straight to AndroidPodium Mobile connects to a box itself. Nothing in between — no dongle, no laptop, no venue network.
BLE Coded PHY — the long-range mode, not ordinary Bluetooth
Box to box — the relay
One wide timing pointA crossing too wide for one box becomes several boxes acting as one. The outer boxes pass their reads to a master, which merges them and sends a single stream onward.
Why you can rely on it
Bluetooth is the easy part. What matters is what happens when it drops, and whether anyone else can put reads into your event.
Reads are held on the box and caught up automatically when the link returns, on a cursor and acknowledgement — the same store-and-forward the 4G path uses. The box does not need anything to be listening in order to keep timing.
That is the buffer behind the link. Long enough that an outage stops being an incident and becomes something you notice afterwards, if at all.
Frames between boxes carry an HMAC-SHA256 tag keyed to your group. A box that
is not yours — another timer set up in the next field, or anything pretending to be a
box — cannot feed reads into your timing point. Unsigned frames are counted and
discarded.
A relayed box is not a dumb sensor. It logs independently and can be asked to replay, so a read is recoverable even if the link was down at the moment it happened.
Box-to-box uses Bluetooth's long-range coded mode rather than the standard one, because a wide crossing is further than an ordinary BLE link is happy with.
Reads are stamped at the box, against its own GPS-locked clock, before they go anywhere. Nothing about the radio, or a delay on it, moves a result.
None of this is an upgrade or a licence. The dongle is the only part you would ever add, and only if you want boxes talking to a PC.