The medal races at the recent UK "Sail for Gold" event had real time tracking and radio commentary. This is a link to the Tornado tracking:-

http://www.cowesweektracking.com/racePlayer/player.aspx?race=37

Let it load, then press play, the race doesn't start for a long while so you can speed it up then slow it down again when the race starts. After zooming in you can move the course by clicking the background and dragging etc. Hover mouse over boat to see who it is. It was very windy...

Other links:-

www.ryaevents.org.uk/sailforgold
www.traxu.com

http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/photos/...;p=&yr=2006

That's cool stuff Colin. Takes a while to work out that all the action is actually right at the end and that the speed slide has to be down as low as poss.

Interesting data window too. I'm assuming that McMillan and Howden lost their transmitter while blasting along at 21knots plus as that's the last bit of data from them....

Now that was cool.

I should have counted how many times I watched that. I kept going back and highlighting a different boat to watch their progression.

I was out in a Mark boat whaler for the I-14 Worlds and had the man that made that program as my second. Really nice guy...he explained this program to me and I was really excited to see it in action. Hopefully it will help with the spectating of sailing events. He mentioned that during a Tornado and 49er regatta they were using this along with cameras in every boat and on chase boats. He got lots of comments on how spectacular it was to see in real time.

Later,
Dan

Really cool technology. I bit expensive to rent for a normal club race but it could be really interesting for bigger regattas.

The downwind speed on the Tornado was impressive, the highest number I saw was around 22 knots!

/hakan

There was a fastest speed prize at the regatta; I think it was that tornado at 22 point something kts and it caused some good natured noise from the RS:X 9.5m competitors because they did not have trackers <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> The Traxu guys are syncing the medal race commentary to their stuff now and tidying up the files to lose the long lead-ins etc. They have lots of exciting plans for the future including an interface to scoring software so that (nominal) overall series results can be constantly updated in real time on the internet. This is useful for commentators (if they can see the internet that is) because it allows them to say "if the boats stay as they are the regatta winner will be...". NB: John, they are not sure what happened to GBR 1's tracker.

Audio is there now.