Navigation Rally

Note

A Navigation Rally licence is requried to run a Navigation Rally. However competitors can download and run TackTracker free of charge to view the replay and results.

TackTracker provides a complete solution for running a Navigation Rally event for power boats.

Sometimes known as Predicted Log Trials, a Navigation Rally is like a motor rally on the water, where competing boats navigate a pre-defined course each with a designated start time and keeping to a nominated speed. As each boat passes through a virtual checkpoint or "gate", penalty points are awarded for each whole second early or late through the gate.

With TackTracker, running a Navigation Rally is no longer a labor intensive process requiring spotters to be stationed around the course to manually record gate times. Instead, scoring is totally automatic and results are available as soon as the GPS tracks are loaded. With fewer volunteers required, navigation rallies are now simple and easy to run.

With the TackTracker Navigation Rally Licence:

Before the Rally:

• Design and layout the rally course - using the Navigation Rally editor.
• Define the gates used to score the competitors. Add as few or many as you need.
• Create a schedule defining each competitor and their start time and speed.
• Inform competitors about the course, with the Rally Course report

During the Rally:

• Each competitor carries a GPS logger to record their times, positions and speeds around the course

After the Rally:

• TackTracker automatically computes times an scores as each track is loaded into the system. Rally results show the penalties awarded at each gate and the total scores for each competitor.
• The rally event can be replayed on a big screen for enjoyment of competitors. A leader-board shows the changing fortunes of each competitor as she navigates the course.
• Officials may impose discretionary penalties for any competitor to be included in their score
• The rally event may be published to the TackTracker Cloud for online replay by competitors. The web player shows rally results online.

Creating a Navigation Rally Event

Create a new Navigation Rally by clicking on the "Nav Rally" tab in the top tab-set. A "Create a new Rally Event" dialog will appear:

• Type in the name of your rally
• Specify the date and start time (hh:mm) for the event. This is typically 5 minutes before the first boat starts.
• Select a nearby landmark to locate the event.
• Click Create Race

Note

If this is your first navigation rally, you may first need to create a landmark to define the location on the globe for your event. This only need be an approximate location, and once created, you can re-use you landmark for all future events at your club.

On creation of your event, it will be loaded into the navigation rally editor in the Nav Rally tab. Now is a good time to save it to your Library by clicking Save Rally Course. You can then go to the library and re-load it at any time.

Customising your event with the Nav Rally Editor

With a nav-rally event loaded, the Nav Rally tab shows the Nav Rally Editor. Here you can define all the details pertaining to your event. Be sure to click Save Rally Course after making changes to save them to your Library.

Setting the Date, Start Time and Interval

All boats must start after the nominated start time for the event. You can specify a start interval of "Free", 1 min, 2 min or 5 min intervals. Or, you can specify Custom start times using a schedule. Boats are to start at the specified interval and points are deducted for actual starting times either before or after the nearest interval after the start.

For example, if the rally start is at 10:00am and the interval is 5 minutes, then boats may start at 10:05, 10:10, 10:15 etc. A boat starting at 10:05:42 is considered as intending to start at 10:05, with an error of 42 seconds. Similarly, a boat starting at 10:04:54 is considered as intending to start at 10:05 with an error of 6 seconds.

If you specify "Free", then boats may start at any time after the rally start with no penalty. Their start time is taken to be the time they actually cross the line.

If you specify "Custom", you must enter the start times into the schedule.

Defining the Course

The rally course is defined by locating a Start point, then adding a series of turns to reach a Finish point. The Start and Finish points may be located either by typing in Lat,Lon coordinates, or using the Lay button to lay the point on the screen with your mouse.

1. Locate the Start Point and press Apply
2. Click "Add Turn" to add a turn. You will see the turn represented on the screen by a yellow dot with a number.

3. Edit the turn. There are three alternative ways to edit a turn:

   1. Type the Lat,Lon coordinates and click Apply
   2. Type the distance traveled and a bearing in degrees. (The default distance units for Nav Rallys are NM, but you can change this in the Settings dialog.)
   3. Lay the turn with your mouse using the Lay button.

4. Repeat step 3. until all turns are specified. As you add turns, you will see the course build out on the map.

   Note that the Add Turn button adds the turn after the selected entry in the course box, not necessarily at the end of the course. If you make a mistake, select the turn in error and click Delete.

5. Lay the Finish Point, or check "Finish at Start" if finishing at the Start point.

For example, here is a simple course mapping out a square:

This is how the course looks on the map:

Adding the Scoring Gates

Tip

We recommended you finish editing the course before adding gates. This is because changes to the course will render the gates obsolete and you may need to delete them and start again.

Rally points are earned at each scoring gate positioned around the course. Points are earned for each second a boat is early or late passing through a gate. The aim for each competitor is to accumulate the smallest total point score.

A start gate is required and it is usual to also add a gate at the finish. You can add as few or as many other course gates in between as you wish. Some advanced rally clubs are regularly using 10 to 20 gates on a course.

Adding the Start Gate

The start gate is positioned at the start point and effectively defines the start line. Boats must pass through the start gate to begin the rally.

To add the start gate:

1. Select "Start" (the top row) in the course table.
2. Click Add Gate

A start gate will be automatically positioned at the start point. It will look on the map like this:

You may edit the gate, for example change the gate length in the gray box below the course table.

Adding the Finish Gate

To add the Finish Gate:

1. Select the last turn in the course table
2. Click Add Gate
3. Edit the distance from turn to the length of the last leg and click Apply. This will move the gate to the finish.

Here is our sample course with start and finish gates added:

Adding and editing Course Gates

Note

All gates belong to a leg of the course. So for example, a gate added after Turn 1 and before Turn 2 will belong to the second leg, which is between Turn 1 and Turn 2. When boats are completing the rally, they must be travelling the second leg of the course for the gate on the second leg to be scored. For this reason it is possible to have the course cross over itself and gates on different legs can overlap without interfering with each other.

To add a gate to the course:

• Select a turn or a gate prior to the gate you wish to add.
• Click Add Gate

For example, in the screen clip below, we have selected Turn 1:

After clicking Add Gate, the Gate 1A-1A is added:

This gate appears on the map like this:

You can edit the gate properties in the Edit Gate dialog below:

Click the associated Apply button after editing any of the values.

Tip

If you change the gate length it may no longer be centered on the course line. To re-centre the gate, click the top Apply button associated with Dist. from turn.

Rally Schedule

For each rally event, you need to create a Rally Schedule, which defines the competitors and their start time and speeds. Click the Schedule... button to open the Rally Schedule dialog. Be sure to click Save Rally Course after making changes to save them to your Library.

In return for your data entry, the schedule presents back to you the estimated times the boat should arrive at each turning point and the finish, based on the start time and nominated boat speed. Use this information to assist with setting of start times and to avoid over-congestion of parts of the course during the event. Another tool to aid rally planning is the Simulate on Map which simulates the replay of the event.

Some notes to help you work with the schedule:

• The schedule may contain blank lines. This is especially useful if you are using a fixed interval and wish to have additional spacing between two boats.
• The GPS Name = Boat Name checkbox controls how the tracker is mapped to a competitor. We recommend you store a fixed ID on the GPS, such as "GPS01" and use the schedule to map the GPS to a competitor. As an alternative, you can check GPS Name = Boat Name and store the competitor name (exactly as it appears in the schedule) on the GPS.
• The Penalties column lets you manually award discretionary penalty points to a competitor

Rules and Penalties

Click Rules to configure leg specific rules and penalty points for the current rally event. The default values for all these rules can be configured in Navigation Rally Settings.

Rules

Currently one rule is available:

Specify the maximum speed for a leg

Check the check box to set the rule, or uncheck it to clear the rule for the selected leg.

Sometimes you may need to impose a reduced maximum speed for a leg, for example to comply with local conditions. To apply this rule, select the turn at which the maximum speed will begin to apply. The maximum speed will apply until the next turn.

Boats that have a nominated speed equal to or lower than the maximum speed will be unaffected, but faster boats will have their target times adjusted and will need to travel no faster than the maximum speed for the leg in order to meet their expected gate crossing times.

Penalties

You can review and customize the penalty points that apply for this rally event. The following penalties may be specified:

Penalty	Default	Explanation
Miss Start Gate	100	Fail to pass through the start gate
Miss Other Gate	50	Fall to pass through the gate (on the correct leg of the course)
Max Gate Score	300	Maxiumum penalty for seconds early or late through a gate

A number of advanced scoring options are also available. These are recommended only for experienced rally clubs where competitors are achieving very low conventional scores.

Multiply penalty by speed

Some clubs wish to incorporate the boat speed into the penalty to acknowledge the fact that faster boats find it easier to earn lower scores. If checked, the gate penalty is multiplied by the boat speed in m/s.

Apply XTD Penalty per meter

The Cross Track Distance (XTD) penalty may be used to help differentiate experienced competitors with very close scores. The XTD penalty is imposed on the distance from the center of the gate for each gate crossing. For example, if an XTD penalty of 0.1 is applied, a competitor that crosses a gate 20m from the center will receive an XTD penalty of 20 * 0.1 = 2 points.

Score Rounding and Fractional Scoring

The default score rounding value of 1.0 means that a boat must be a full second early or late to a gate to score one penalty point.

You can reduce the score rounding value down to 0.5, in which case anything over 0.5 seconds is rounded up to count as one penalty point. So, for example, with a score rounding of 1.0, a boat that is 3.7 seconds late through a gate will score a 3 point penalty. With a score rounding of, say, 0.6, the boat will score a 4 point penalty.

An alternative to score rounding is to use fractional scoring. If selected, the score is incremented by the fractional seconds early or late. So the boat 3.7 seconds late will incur a 3.7 point penalty.

Simulate on Map

After populating the Rally Schedule, it is useful to watch a simulation of the event to learn when boats are scheduled to pass each other, so that dangerous situations can be avoided ahead of time. For example, if you know that two boats would be passing near an obstruction or at a turn you could adjust the schedule times to avoid the situation.

TackTracker can create simulated tracks for each boat based on their scheduled start time and speed. Simply click the "Simulate on Map" button and move the timeline or press play to watch how the boats will interact. Simulated tracks will not be saved with the event, and you can't generate simulated tracks if the event has real tracks in it.

Discretionary Penalties

TackTracker automatically computes a boat's score by measuring her performance through the gates. However some rule-books prescribe other penalties that TackTracker cannot detect. For example:

• Failure to fly club burgee: 10 points
• Failure to comply with starting or finishing procedures: 50 points
• Changes from nominated speed in an attempt to better time or position on the course: 50 points
• A fixed handicap penalty assigned to a competitor

To handle these types of penalties, TackTracker allows penalties to be manually entered into the system. This can be done either in the Rally Schedule, or in the Rally Results.

The Penalties column shows any discretionary penalty imposed on each boat. The Score column includes the penalty imposed.

Click on a penalty button cell in the results table to show the penalty editor for the selected boat:

Each row defines a penalty score and a reason for the penalty. To add a penalty, click in the Penalty cell and start typing.

Competitors viewing a race are able to see a read-only form of this dialog so they can see what penalties are assigned to them.

Penalties are saved as part of the rally schedule and may be imposed even before the tracks have been loaded. To edit penalties before tracks are loaded, use the Rally Schedule dialog to access the penalty editor.

TackTracker also provides a Rally Penalties report listing all penalties imposed for the event.

Event Simulation

Competitor Information

Rally Results

When GPS tracks are loaded in for a Navigation Rally, results are automatically computed. Go to the Nav Rally Results tab in the bottom tab-set to view your results:

Each competitor is listed as a row in the table, and their times through each scoring gate are recorded and scored against the theoretical time for their nominated speed.

Points are totaled for each competitor Score column.

• Sort any column by clicking on its column header. Click the Score column to sort by Score and view the results in leaderboard sequence.
• Generate an HTML report of these results by clicking "Print Results"

Tip

Go to the Reports tab to can generate results in other formats, such as CSV for importing into a spreadsheet.

Result Precision

TackTracker internally records all times in millisecond precision, however the results are printed rounded to the nearest second. This sometimes leads to competitors questioning TackTracker's arithmetic in computing a gate penalty. The explanation is that the report shows rounded values, but the calculations are done before rounding.

If you need to clarify any scoring query, print the results and check Show fractional seconds in result times.