Recently we've had a debate in our class about adopting Racesense, a wireless network of GPS instruments that take over the OCS duties for the RC. With success stories like the RC being able to identify and individual recall 20+ competitors. I begin to wonder about the unintended consequences. Is a race sailed where a large fraction of the fleet is recalled really a fair race and a desirable outcome? The boats starting correctly are initially buried by premature starters first being OCS and then sailing back to start properly. What happens if your unit happens to be off, etc. No one wants to sit through endless recalls and this company definitely found their "killer app" for adoption in multiple fleets, but I wanted to take the temperature of other ROs to see what other people's thoughts are, SI verbiage and pitfalls included.
For this reason, the NOR or SIs need to have some language so that there’s a fallback when Racesense isn’t functioning properly (or is completely down). Maybe that’s a signal flag stating that Racesense isn’t being used and the race committee is reverting to traditional techniques of manually sighting OCS boats, code flags for individual and general recalls, etc.
No it does not. Racesense does not rely on 4G / Internet connection.
You could run racesense in the middle of the atlantic
How does RaceSense communicate? Does it use cellular networks?
I have now done several events with Racesense and truly impressive.
Check this video out, Racesense in action.
-Starting under P
-At the pin end a GBR-RS21
-GBR sees on his Vakaros "OCS" /w flashing red lights. Immediate at start signal.
-GBR has enough room to pin to correct and bears off immediate
-When GBR dips under line and is clear he will see 'CLEAR' on his Vakaros.
-Immediate turns back and is racing, second line start but still racing!!
If you see this, I mean.... what can I say as a sailor this i s how I would want it.
Myself sailing Star NED-8313, I certainly hope we have Racesense at Worlds in Kroatie this year (100 entries)
For years many fleets who allow full use of electronic tools have used start line identification devices from companies like Velocitek and various other GPS based tools to judge their proximity to a start line.
This doesn't really change any of that.
Also I don't really see this sort of tech being installed on an Optimist any time soon, although I could be wrong.
The reason I say this is that, if you look at Vakaros' pricing model for RaceSense, a sailor buys an annual pass or monthly pass (https://vakaros.com/products/month-pass). That means you need to authenticate someone (e.g., Auth0 or similar service) and processes payments (e.g., Stripe or similar service).
Let's suppose they use Auth0. Auth0 has had issues as recently as two weeks ago:
https://status.auth0.com/incidents
And let's suppose they use Stripe. Stripe's had issues the past couple of days:
https://status.stripe.com/
I'm just picking Auth0 and Stripe as representative vendors; any cloud vendor will have downtime. The point is to be prepared. So, race committees should have a fallback, such as traditional race signals.
I have been considering many of the above points recently, and was directed to this presentation which is useful regardless of which system being discussed.
Actually, many pertinent questions answered. Thanks to the presenters.
https://youtu.be/EPSAhtVV70M?si=WWmYWMAnI8sXq3_B&sfnsn=wa
Hope it helps.
Or can I have two units..... one visible on the mast (and not registered.....) and the othe on the back of my boat that is registered and not clearly visible for outsiders? Or can I "tinker" with my system and demount the GPS from inside and run a it with a wire to the back of my boat and mount the little receiver there?
Just some thoughts ....... I prefer classic starting and just have the RC fly one or two drones static positioned over the staring line. Plus I believe that system and software-license are too much of a burden for many sailors
Like many things: It depends.
If the PRO realizes that the large number of boats OCS is due to a poorly set line or radical changes in wind or current, then I feel that AP prior to the start or a General Recall is the correct response.
However, if the large number of boats OCS is simply a fleet characteristic or early event jitters, then I do not agree. My reason is that within a fleet with a large number of OCS boats there are boats who did not break a rule and started on time. Every time I have to use a General Recall I have to accept that I've deprived the boat(s) that obeyed the rules of their right to win the start. That seems fundamentally unfair to those who obeyed the rules and is to be avoided.
That is exactly my point! Sailors, similar to F1 teams, have the habit of "tinkering" with class rules and Ratings all the time. Many search the grey-limits..... So every sailor has to manually enter the offset dinstance from the bow. For me that would immediately tempt me to make a negative correction of at least 25cm, since that is the accuracy tolerance mentioned. If there are waves, I might even add a few centimeters more..... And the real neirds will open up the Vakaros and definitely look if they can find a way to dismount the GPS-chip and rewire it so it can be placed aft of the unit itself, which ofcourse has the offsett nicely entered for the position of the unit ..... No one will notice, since llikely the whole RC is only looking down at a screen.....
I am just letting my imagination go free here ..... Trust me, I have seen plenty of creative ways to tinker with class and rating regulations which for some is a sport in itself.
@ Beau - I fully agree with your input!
Like most threads, this one has interesting drift. (By way of background, I'm a retired tech guy and investor with a long history in the semiconductor and software industries. I'm also a retired Regional Race Officer and National Judge.) There are some real issues that a Judge and Race Officer must consider when thinking about these systems. More on that at the end.
The Future: With respect to what can happen in the future, all these systems should eventually:
- Notify when a boat is in the Zone around a mark
- Notify the Competitors when there is an overlap, and when it is broken
- Log the finish time of each boat and time of each mark rounding for use in applying redress and safety monitoring
- Notify the Competitors and Log any violation of restricted areas called out in the NoR and SIs
- Provide real-time location tracking without the need for other trackers (depending on $$$s)
- Provide a file to the Jury of the position of all Boats, Marks, Boat Speed, Course Tracks, Headings, etc... during the race and for analysis by the competitors.
- Add something I haven't thought of yet.....
For a good look at what the future will be for all racers, one need only review what Stan Honey and his team have done for the America's Cup and SailGP. Eventually this is foundation the same sort of system fulfilling Stan's forecast that eventually you can do all this with a phone. If one adds wind speed and direction sensors, even the grids lines that appeared for the AC and SailGP can be superimposed on the data files for races for real-time viewing and post-race review. We are not at the "...with a phone." state yet because of the terrible antenna in the phone and in most consumer grade GPS devices.
Accuracy and Quality of an Antenna: All Race Officers, Jury Members, and Competitors need to educate themselves on the true real-world accuracy of these systems. Sadly, some folks are conflating the specified accuracy of the GPS chips with the actual accuracy of the system in which the chip is embedded. The "chip" used for RTK-level GPS can be accurate down to 2cm (0.79"). However, to achieve this accuracy, one must provide a significantly larger antenna to the RTK-level GPS Chip than any current vendor provides outside of expensive and quite large separate devices. It appears that the Minimum size antenna required is currently around 10cm (4") in diameter, it must have a comparatively unobstructed view of the sky to receive a minimum number of satellites, and it currently takes substantially more power than cell phone vendors and other devices are willing to "pay" (thus a bigger battery). What this means is that a new generation of high accuracy RTK-GPS devices (meaning displays with GPS in them) must be developed before anyone can reach the 2cm accuracy level that the highest competitors could require. For some of the current tests of RTK-GPS enabled starting line systems in places like the New York and St. Francis yacht clubs, large external commercial RTK-GPS devices have been used to achieve this accuracy. ROs and Judges need to understand what vendors are talking about out when they make a claim of accuracy.
Measuring Accuracy: Like many things in the real world there is a distribution of results associated with accuracy. The current generation of integrated phone style GPS devices has a tested accuracy distribution of 1 meters for a given level of repeatability. Like most mathematical distributions, the maximum error rate is far less that 1 meter, but Judges and ROs need to know that in a large fleet (100s of boats) across multiple races at an event, there is a significant possibility of at least 0.5 to 1 meter error occurring. While this is still much better than the accuracy of a bow-crew bouncing up and down on the pulpit trying to call the line, it is not more accurate than a PRO's team sighting the line.
Like many things in the real world, the probability of errors is distributed and represented by a curve. Therefore, a completely accurate measure of a device's "accuracy" would be expressed by a probability of some unacceptable error expressed as something like "1 in 1,000 for a 10cm error". A simple statement of accuracy without probability can be misleading. For the America's Cup and SailGP, an accuracy of 2cm was not only required, it was regularly tested by competitors. Put another way, those competitors were hitting the line with speed and often within single digit centimeters. I believe one would find that calibre of accuracy demanded by Olympic level fleets and many other Classes that are highly competitive. (EG: Star, ILCA, Moth, Etchells) For these reasons, some of us have been advising OAs and PROs on these issues and clarifying expectations regarding current solutions true accuracy when run without a RTK-GPS with a large antenna.
On the first race I had 3 boats "go dark" a couple of minutes before the start and appear after the start. The system told me who they were. I said I would abandon any race where this happened again and give them new units. It never happened again.
I was told that each unit was preprogrammed with the shape of the boat. I don't know if the competitors could change that nor if it was programmed as a box or a boat shape.
I was also told that at a previous regatta a couple of boats had been wrongly programmed as TP52s so were OCS each race on that day.
The Race Docs allowed the RC & PC to request redress but not the competitor. We had a flag we could put up to go back to normal starts if the system failed. It didn't.
We had 9 races, all on P flag, 2 restarts, one because the Committee boat dragged in the last 30 seconds putting a third of the fleet over in 20+ knots, the other on the penultimate start when the tide was under the fleet and most boats were over and I was concerned that the returning boats wold disadvantage the ones not over and there was a serious risk of accidents. The re-start was clean.
All the boats my start team identified as over were recalled, however there was often 3-6 boats called OCS that my start team thought had started properly. The system reported them all clear within a second.
The finishing order differed substantially both from my finish team results and the video. Boats coming up from behind going fast were often called as finished in front of slower boats in front.
From a sailor's point of view most boats ended up hovering on the line at the start. The boats that did well either had room to bear away down the line to keep their speed up or hit the line going fast just after the start and popped out in front of of the others who were going slowly.
In summary I liked the system. We had no OCS, UFD or BFDs and only 2 re-starts. Sailors enjoyed the event. The best sailors still won, the game is just slightly different. Personally I wouldn't bother with starting flags as un-necessary unless the system fails. The competitors need briefing properly. I would love to know more about who sets the boat "type" in the boat unit and who can change it.
Happy to share my race document wording if anyone wants it.
RRS 56.3 in this rule book includes new wording "or any other tracking device, it shall not be turned off to its effectiveness intentionally reduced." My question is: are the race officials willing to protest a boat who turns off their device?
With RaceSense l tell them in the briefing I will stop the start if they disappear and replace their unit. If it happens again I will score them DNS (or OCS if I saw them over). Never had to do that in practice.
I remain to be convinced that the use of a tracking device complies with this definition. For instance can the system judge a boat sailing sideways, of backwards, across the line in a strong tide I look forward to reading the new Test Rule!
Peter, it is not the case that all of these units have the same level of "accuracy", as I said above accuracy is determined by the combination of the GPS chip used (technically is it a L1-L5 chip or not) in combination with the size and quality of the antenna employed. While many of these units, including devices from B&G, Garmin, and Raytheon, utilize similar chips which are primarily produced for cell phones, they do not have the same antennas. As a result, they have wildly different levels of accuracy.
At this point only the Velocitek prototype used by NYYC and StFYC, which is using an external antenna that is accurate to 2cm, can achieve that level of accuracy. The older Velocitek and Vakaros systems have a much lower level of accuracy to about 1 meter.
You are correct to point out that the precision of these devices is not being discussed here. So far, I have had no input from the chip manufacturers or any of the vendor that there are problems with precision, only that the errors created by poor antennas has reduce accuracy. You are also correct that both factors contribute to the size of the error. But, given that almost all of the vendors are using the same chips (used in cell phones), it's unlikely that the chip vendor has the precision wrong. (That last bit is just my opinion.)
https://globalgpssystems.com/gnss/rtk-gps-understanding-real-time-kinematic-gps-technology/
Finally, the accuracy we're talking about was used in the last two America's Cup events and all the SailGP events to-date and continues to run without failure. If it's good enough for these events, I feel it's certainly good enough for most regattas.
Though it was not actually used for finishes, it was consulted to fix a disagreement between top deck and wheelhouse line callers.
Also quite a helper in finding boats that had not checked in.
What wording have you used?
The following is the links to the Documents the RS21 Class uses.
The Series and Event NoR is: https://www.racingrulesofsailing.org/events/10765
The standard Sailing Instructions are here (note para 32): https://s3.amazonaws.com/rrs.prod/vkoq3fzabjwkjvloucg8vt0e8ge2?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22RS21UK%2526ICup2025-SSIs%20Final.pdf%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27RS21UK%26ICup2025-SSIs%2520Final.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAJH37WFGGNKRSBH6Q%2F20250317%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20250317T123054Z&X-Amz-Expires=604800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=4b0562c8f7e02790a626dde82dfeadd30c61cf6da72f8517a066733f6333a602
Hopefully those links work OK.
1. Is there a typo in 32.7?
32.7 If the RC vessel displays flag GOLF with a sound signal before the warning signal of a race, SIs 21.1 and 21.2 will not apply and the Orange Flag
shall be displayed before the Warning Signal for the next race.
SI 21 refers to Event Advertising.
2. Do the SIs replace the visual and sound signals in RRS 26 by the system signals?
The J/70ICA will run RaceSense at all major events, including Worlds, continental championships, etc, as well as almost the entire domestic slate.
If you don't have your "own" base station, you most certainly can have problems. At least at the current time. In the near future, there could be commercially available base stations because of the demand from self-driving cars. They wish to know exactly where they are and current GPS, even with a good antenna, has too large a chance of error putting the car in the wrong lane. Mounted on poles or buildings, the base stations can have a much clearer view of the sky and reduce dead spots and multi-path effects. RTK GPS has a chance of possibly eliminating having to use camera/lidar for lane following to the degree it is used now. The car will still need to watch for changes that aren't yet mapped. etc...
The RTK GPS used in sailboat racing (America's Cup and SailGP) has always had a dedicated base station within range of a proprietary network that communicates to the Signal Boat and the Competitors, to address this problem. It is my understanding that all the significant vendors are working to move to RTK. Both NYYC and St. Francis YC's tests of RTK GPS included this. Tests that were not RTK obviously didn't have a base station at all. So the choice is basically reasonable probability of 2cm accuracy with RTK and about 1meter without it.