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0 pointsinopinatus5y ago0 comments

Transponders are very common in club level racing now, and the accuracy available is good enough for the grassroots level of competition in pretty much every discipline (except, possibly, track sprint).

Still, I think there will always be a place for a stone-faced commissaire with a clipboard, freezing their ass off in the finish-line rain, watching the bunch draw near.

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sverhagen5y ago· 1 in thread

I worked in this field, posted elsewhere on this page about working photo finish at Amstel Gold in the past. Around that time we also experimented with transponders, maybe even at an Amstel Gold Race, else at the Netherlands Tour (or Eneco Tour). The accuracy, at high speed, of transponders, didn't quite solve for the close finishes. A bigger problem were the practical issues: transponders gone missing in crashes, bike switches, transponders being mounted in the wrong place (enough to matter). It's not a substitute for photo finish. It is, though, a great substitute for reading bib numbers off of a poorly lighted photo finish. They're complementary.

vbsteven5y ago

Would you be so kind to provide a short high level summary on how the transponder tech works?

I always assumed the transponders were mostly used for GC timekeeping in multi-day stage races and maybe help automate the initial results shown on TV post-finish.

The live telemetry (wattage, speed, heartrate) we've seen in some races the last few years are also very interesting. But that's probably a different tech stack from transponders used for timekeeping.

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