The two things that end a race day are a flat battery and water in the wrong place. Neither announces itself, and both are entirely preventable the night before.
Water is the enemy of a read
A UHF tag has no battery. The reader has to power it and then hear a very quiet answer back, and water absorbs exactly the signal doing both jobs.
So rain does not break the equipment. It quietly costs you reads:
- A soaked shirt over a bib tag is a tag with water between it and the antenna.
- Standing water on the line, or saturated ground, changes what the antenna is working against.
- A wet body screens a tag better than a dry one, so a bunch finish in the rain is harder than the same finish in the dry.
Test in the conditions you will run in. A dry-morning test proves the dry morning. If the forecast is wet, the useful test is a wet one — and if you cannot get one, plan the backup instead (Back everything up).
An active tag carries its own battery and announces itself, so it forgives weather far better. If you have a choice of tag for a wet event, that is the consideration.
Keeping the kit alive
- The box goes out of the weather. It is the thing that must survive the day. Under cover, off the ground, out of standing water.
- Cables are where water gets in, and a connector sitting in a puddle is the one that fails at hour four. Bring them in from above where you can, and tape them down where people walk (Where to put the mat).
- Condensation is real. Kit brought from a cold vehicle into a warm marquee, or the reverse, gets wet on the inside. Give it time.
Batteries
Cold flattens a battery faster than the same day would warm. A winter cross-country or a long night section takes more out of everything than the number on the spec sheet suggests.
Charge everything the night before, including the ones nobody thinks of:
- The boxes.
- The phone or laptop doing the timing. Holding radio links to boxes all day is hard work for a phone, and it is the device you cannot do without.
- The active tags. They are battery powered. Tags that have been in a crate since last season get tested, not assumed.
Watch the battery column rather than remembering to think about it. Both apps show each box's battery, and a box that is going flat tells you so long before it goes quiet. A box that has already gone quiet looks identical to a box out of range or switched off (A box will not connect).
Long events
For a twelve or twenty-four hour race, treat power as part of the plan rather than a check:
- Know the runtime, and know it for the conditions — a cold night is not a mild afternoon.
- Have the changeover worked out before you need it, including who does it and what happens to the reads while it happens. The box keeps its own log, so a box that is off the link is not losing anything (Getting back reads you missed).
- Check in through the event, not at the end. See Lap and multi-lap racing.
If a box goes quiet anyway
The reads are not lost. Every box keeps its own log, so a box that timed a whole race flat on its link still has everything on it. Deal with the link, then pull the reads off (The reads stopped part way through).
What you cannot recover is a read the box never took. That is why the backup matters and why the tag placement matters — a flat box is fixable, a tag nobody could read is not.
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