Following on from the Oceanic FW Championships in January, Ian and Devon worked together to get the “illegal” use of GPS in FW racing “overlooked” during the FW Worlds in order to get a whole new level of visibility and interactivity to sailors and spectators alike over video and internet. Devon arranged the Top 20 racers to all participate in the program, whilst Ian organised the GPS units with support from Garmin and managed all the downloads and logistics of having the units on the right guys at the right time. Following the days racing, the data was downloaded and faced with a lot of extra even later night work required to edit and prepare the tracks for use in Yann Mathlet’s GPS Action Replay software, they called in Robert van Kreuningen to assist, Robert continued to put significant hours of post processing the GPS tracklogs literally whist those on the ground in Australia got some well earnt sleep. (We really want to thank Robert for his additional help and stepping up to the plate at short notice on this one !!)

The results from Championship races 4 and 5 you can see for yourselves at

http://www.santaclararacing.org/GPSAR/FWRace4.html

http://www.santaclararacing.org/GPSAR/FWRace5.html

… A word of caution ; these files are rather big and complex multistage downloads;

Don’t panic or hang up on the download too soon ; Likewise pushing REFRESH is not a cool idea s it will blow away the existing downloaded data.

Bryan McDonald from Apple has been helping to set up some higher speed server access, which will help a lot , but so far it’s not on line for this application – well, not just yet !!

Use of these downloads is strictly for fun and taken “as is”; no warranty given or implied. But it’s the future :)) Enjoy.

And an interesting footnote is that at the FW class AGM held on Wednesday Leduc, it was decided strongly to support and allow the use of GPS tracking and data collection throughout FW racing as an extra opportunity to help increase the level of awareness and interest in FW racing both on the water and online.

Cheers ~ Ian and Devon