Club Regatta Licensed Features

Note

These features are unlocked with a Club Regatta licence.

Yacht clubs regularly using tracking have a range of needs not shared by a small group of enthusiasts doing logged tracking. There are more trackers to manage and there are typically several different classes or fleets sailing multple races in a race session. Handicaps are often involved and corrected times and places must be worked out.

The Club Regatta license unlocks a suite of such advanced features essential to club tracking. Let's take a look!

Competitor Schedule

The competitor schedule is a powerful tool for managing fleets of trackers and competitors. The schedule is a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file located in My Tracks\CompetitorSchedule.csv. It may be exported into a spreadsheet for editing, but you must then export it back to CSV for TackTracker to recognise your changes.

The purpose of the competitor schedule is to manage competitor information and assign trackers to competitors. This means you can store a permanent ID on each tracker and use the schedule to map that ID to a competitor, rather than having to store the competitor name directly into the tracker.

The competitor schedule appears in the player at the top of your Race Library.

When you select Competitor Schedule the following editor dialog appears:

The image above shows an empty schedule. Click the Add button to add a row. You will want to create a row for every competitor sailing at your club. If they are assigned a tracker, put the tracker ID in the NICKNAME column. If you are live tracking, the NICKNAME is the live tracker nickname.

Here is an example schedule. The club has three fleets, ILCA4, ILCA6, Tasar and Aero6. It has 6 GPS units, which are allocated to the ILCA4's and Tasars.

Editing the Schedule

Use the buttons on the left side work of the dialog to with rows in the table. You can add, insert, delete or move a selected row.

Use the buttons at the bottom of the dialog to work with columns in the table. You can Clear the NICKNAME column, delete the selected column (except for NAME) and insert a column after the selected column.

The empty schedule is pre-populated with the most commonly used columns, but there are many other columns you can add to the schedule. To add a column, select a row in the table at the column before the position you want the new column to appear in the table. Click Insert Column... and the following dialog appears:

Click the drop down arrow to see the list of predefined columns not yet added to your schedule. You can also add any column of your own for your own purposes. Such a column will be ignored by TackTracker.

The main columns described below, and note the editor also has column descriptions at the top:

Column	Mandatory	Description
NICKNAME	No	The identifier of the tracker. For a logger, this is the Name stored on the Tracker. For a live tracker, this is the Nickname. If no tracker is assigned, leave blank.
FLEET	No	The fleet this competitor is assigned to. See Fleets below.
COUNTRY	No	Three letter country code for international fleets. See Country Flags below.
NAME	Yes	The name uniquely identifies the competitor and is the primary label used on the map.
DETAILS	No	Supplementary competitor details displayed in the Select tab and optionally on the map.
COLOR	No	Color of the competitor boat and tail on the map. A color is randomly chosen when you click Add. Must be one of the allowed colors listed in the header comment."
METERS	No	Length of boat in meters
FEET	No	Length of boat in feet
CRAFT	No	Craft type. Choose from: SmallMono, LargeMono, SailBoard, Catamaran, MotorBoat, Vehicle, Bike, Marker, Spectator
TCC	No	Handicap. See Handicaps below.

Competitor Schedule Actions

The Competitor Schedule entry in the Library has a right-click menu, with additional actions you can perform:

Action	Description
Open Schedule	Open the schedule editor (same as left-clicking the mouse button)
Reload Schedule	Use this to reload the schedule into TackTracker if you have made changes to CompetitorSchedule.csv using an external program such as a spreadsheet.
Upload Schedule to Cloud	Upload the schedule to the TackTracker Cloud to schedule trackers for a live tracked race.
Copy to New Schedule	Copy this file to a new schedule with a name of your choosing. You can manage multiple competitor schedule files, however the primary competitor schedule is always the one called "Competitor Schedule" from CompetitorSchedule.csv.

To illustrate when you might use the Copy to New Schedule feature, image your competitor schedule has all your club sailors in it, but next weekend you are hosting the Tasar Championships. You would copy the current schedule and call it "club" and also create one called "Tasar Regatta". You now have three schedule files in your library:

Edit any of the schedules in the same way as the primary schedule, which is always the one called "Competitor Schedule". You can right-click on the other schedules and click Copy over Primary Schedule. So, when running the Tasar Regatta, copy the Tasar schedule onto the primary schedule. When the Tasar regatta is over, copy the "club" schedule back onto the primary schedule to resume tracking club races. When you are finished with the Tasar schedule, you can right click and Delete it.

Fleets

Most yacht clubs have several different fleets competing in an afternoon's racing. You can track each fleet individually, creating a separate race for each fleet, but with a Club Regatta licence it is also possible to track multiple fleets in the same race.

Each fleet can have it's own start time and is scored independently. By default fleets share the same course, but you can also define a different course for each fleet. The only requirement is that all fleets share the same start and finish line.

If you wish to use fleets at your club, you should check New races enable multiple fleets by default in Settings. Otherwise you will need to manually select Multiple fleets and start times in the Options tab in the Race Editor for every race.

Start Options

The Club Regatta licence adds a Start Options section to the Options tab in the Race Editor:

These are described below:

Start Option	Description
Multiple fleets and start times	Enable fleets support for this race. (Set the default value in Settings)
Detect start violations (OCS, DNS)	If checked, TackTracker will mark the boat as OCS or DNS if it violates the start. Use for automated race scoring.
Open Start	Allow a boat to start at any time they wish. The start time is the time she crosses the line. This option is exclusive to the other two.

Start Time

With fleets enabled, the Race Editor Start tab lets you configure a separate start time for each fleet:

In this example, there are three fleets, DIV1, DIV2 and DIV3, each starting 5 minutes apart.

Select a row in the starts table to edit the start time in the text box above. Alternatively you can click the Set to ... button to set the start to the current player time shown in the timeline.

• Click Add to add a new fleet start entry
• Select a fleet start row and click Edit to edit the fleet assigned to this row
• Select a fleet start row and click Delete to delete the start for the selected fleet.

If fleets are not enabled, you will see the old behavior, which is that multiple start times can still be defined, and boats are allocated automatically to a start by their line crossing time.

Fleet Courses

With fleets enabled, you can assign a separate course to each fleet on the Course & Marks tab of the Race Editor:

By default, all fleets share the same course, but you can specify a different course for a fleet by selecting the fleet in the Fleet drop down box.

Country Flags

If your club or regatta runs international classes, you may wish to display a country flag against each competitor.

You can specify the country for each Trackee in the Tracks tab or in the Competitor Schedule COUNTRY column.

The country is specified using the international standard 3 digit country code. Once specified, the country flag is displayed in the Select tab in the player for each competitor.

Handicaps

TackTracker can calculate corrected times for a variety of handicap systems. You can specify the handicap system you wish to use in the Race Editor Options tab. Different handicap values may be used for Onshore or Offshore racing.

The default and by far the most common handicap method is Time on Time, or "TCC", where the corrected time is actual time multiplied by the TCC value. You can change the default handicap method in Settings.

Other supported methods are detailed below:

Value(s)	Handicap Method	Explanation
TCC	Time on Time	Corrected Time = Actual Time x TCC
ToD	Time on Distance	The handicap value (also known as BSF) represents the time a given boat will take to travel 1 Nautical Mile. Corrected Time = Actual Time - Course Length (NM) x ToD
PLT, PLD	Performance Line	The corrected time uses both a time correct and a distance correction: Corrected time = Actual Time x PLT - Course Length (NM) x PLD
TccLow, TccMed, TccHigh	Triple Number	Time on Time, but three different TCC values are specified for different wind speeds. Low <= 9 Knots, Med between 10 and 13 knots, High >= 14 knots.

You can specify the handicap for each boat individually in the Tracks tab - but in almost all cases it is more convenient to source the handicap values from the Competitor Schedule. Remember, you can right-click on the race in the Library and click Update Race from Competitor Schedule to apply the latest values from the Competitor Schedule.

Handicap Results

When handicaps are in use, the Select tab gains another column Adj Place, short for Adjusted Place, accounting for corrected time.

You can sort by scratch place or Adjusted place by clicking the desired column header. Check the "Sort Place" check box to sort automatically as you replay - to create a Leader board effect. Click the column header to select which column you wish to automatically sort.

In addition:

• The Legs table will have a new Adjusted Time column showing the adjusted times for each boat in the leg.
• A range of handicap aware reports are provided with handicap results.

Unattended Replay

TackTracker's Auto replay feature provides a compelling replay experience without any manual intervention required. Auto replay tracks the leading boats in the fleet and slows down for mark roundings and the start and finish.

With your Club Regatta license, you can also select multiple races for replay. In the Race Library, use the right-click menu to select "Add to Autoplay list" for each race you want to replay.

A red circular icon will appear against the event. You can add as many events to the auto play list as you want.

When done, start playing any event in Auto mode. When the event is complete, the next event on the auto play list is loaded and will begin playing. Over time, all events in the auto play list will be replayed in a continuous loop.