I don't think the GPS tracking was ever looked at from the race management perspective, just by individual teams. With all the other logistics involved, I think Chuck already has his hands as full as he wants them. Rick looked into the type of systems used by truck fleet managers for all the competitors once, but it looked bulky.

@scooby - The cost is in the set up. I would imagine the price tag for setting up this component to the web site cost more than the entire web site last year. Sure, it's quick to get the pic, blurb about boat and crew, etc., but you have to do it for ALL of the competitors AFTER you have developed a format to slip everything into, and it is interactive and tied to the moving, constantly updated position of the boat. Plus, you can't give it to a flunkie - whoever wrote the stuff is intimately familiar or did an awful lot of research.

Anyway - I'm impressed. Well executed - I didn't see it hiccup or fail once throughout. I knew of the first retirement from Google before it hit the news!

Sorry, disagee. All it requires is a real time data feed and then the trapping of this data. I would be very surprised if Google Earth do not already have standard interface(s) that you can tap into (for a fee no doubt) that will provide the lat/long in real time based on an imput via a GPS provider/monitor.

The only problem may be formatting the data that is being sent to the "Sydney Hobart race control" people into the form that Google Earth will accept, which I cannot see as being difficult.

Just a bit like a real time feed into a web site.

I think that you are underestimating the problem, writing some software for google earth is maybe a few days work.
The real problem is gathering the actual data and putting it into to the software.

The cheapest would be to place a cheap garmin GPS onboard from which you daily upload the track data to google earth. They use a lithium battery which lasts long enough and are very light. Sure its not realtime but I dont think that would matter to much.

Realtime tracking is much more challenging to do on beachcats than on yachts. To do it properly you would have to use something like satellite Argos beacons (which is probably what they use with sydney-hobart) which require big batteries and are very heavy.

If you are feeling creative you could probably rig a GSM/GPRS phone up to a gps-on-a-chip and stream the nmea data from there for cheap.

But the original query was:



So my point stands. The web interface is easy as most of the work is already done. The boats (I assume, as you do) already have to carry the Argos Beacon, so it as you say is a couple of days work - If that.