THSCC Forums

That would be a great way to use an automated announcing program. Just have the T&S computer announce it over its speakers and leave a radio on beside it.

As a member of the timing & scoring team, I have to disagree (sorry Mike). From my viewpoint, communication of times & penalties was lacking compared to our typical past events. No fault of anyone, it's just that we were relying on a person to communicate the raw times instead of the usual automatic visual readout. Sometimes the announcers were being distracted and weren't able to get every single time announced - I noticed quite a few were missed - again, nobody's fault, it is what it is. As far as cone penalties go, again I think we fell short of our usual capabilities. From inside the bus, the reason was obvious. The loudest sound in the bus, by far, was the announcer's voice - the speakers attached to the bus were much closer and louder inside the bus than with our past set-up, which was more distracting to those of us trying to do timing & scoring. It was often hard to hear course workers/cone penalties, requiring multiple back-and-forth radio communications at times. It was also much more difficult to communicate cone penalties from inside the bus to the announcer, and as hard as I tried to make it happen, I ended up giving up at times just to avoid complicating the situation more by shouting cone penalties that might or might not get heard/announced.

Also, not a complaint about any particular event, etc., but personally, it's obvious that T&S runs smoother and is a whole lot less stressful when we can see car nos. at both the start and finish lines from inside the bus - it gives us the opportunity to double check the time for each car (instead of relying on "blind" faith that a car wasn't accidentally missed, etc.), and it keeps the airwaves clearer, since the starter doesn't call in each car no. at the line. While I agree that the flexibility of running course configurations we couldn't before the wireless set is beneficial, there is some downside to distant start or finish lines from the timing standpoint.

Just my opinion, FWIW.

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Keith Q.
2008 Top Gun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmX8XuZ_DCo&NR=1

Keith,
Could you please cross post your comments into the thread Mike started about communicating times and penalties. I think this is very pertinent and makes a good point from the T&S folks perspective.
Graham

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http://www.greywinds.com

I'm still new to all this, but I think this club does a great job. I appreciate all the hard work that is done.
Regarding the course layout at Laurinburg - I didn't think there was anything wrong with the course. It was technically very good. However, it seems that when there is an opportunity for a longer course with higher speeds, we should take advantage of that opportunity. We are limited in some places to a tight, relatively lower speed course. Laurinburg isn't one of those. Perhaps there could be an "understanding" that Laurinburg's course would have some faster sections and be a bit longer.

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Rubbin' is Racin'

Amen.