Colorado Timing Sytem, Aquatics results capture Options

[Ted Hope]

I'm fresh off a very long 2-day Special Olympics Championship Game in which I captured all swim times from the Colorado clock. This was my first experience using GMS in this fashion and some questions have arisen.

1. GMS (or CTS) kept dropping the serial link and recovery required telling GMS to select a different Game in CTS then ask for the current Game. This always resulted in recovery of communications. Of course, I'd like to not have the link dropped in the first place.

2. GMS could not be coerced into downloading any just-completed race. It seemed I could not download any race until the next race was complete. This is OK but quite unusual behavior. Mostly I noticed this behavior on short, fast races.

3. GMS cannot (or I could not) capture back-up times from CTS. In the SO aquatic environment, about 95% of the races have one or more of what are called "soft touches". A "soft touch" occurs when the primary end-of-race signal from the touch pad on the finish-end wall is not activated by the swimmer. Back-up times created by human timers with CTS push-buttons are recorded by CTS and an "official Back-up time" created for every race. GMS seems only able to record the primary (touch pad) time. This results in having to print every race from CTS (print-out includes backup times and splits) and manually enter the CTS back-up time in GMS. So...I need GMS to access the back-up times from CTS.

4. When a back-up time is manually entered into GMS, the placings (1st, 2nd, etc) are not updated automatically. Operator must remember to activate the "Update placings" control, not easy when there is a new race every 25 seconds and 4 out of 8 times are being typed (because GMS doesn't 'do' back-up times). We/I need the placings to be updated automatically.

5. There were many races where captured times showed the Lane in RED. I thought this was a flag for soft touches but this turned out to be incorrect. The question arises, however, "Does GMS know about soft touches in any way?" If GMS does know, it must get a flag from CTS which will exist if any primary pad time is slower by 0.3s than the back-up time. If GMS reads this flag, it is very unreliable as over 40% of soft touches did not result in RED flagged lanes.

6. I used the 'Over achiever' feature of GMS to identify swimmers whose final swim time was too fast. GMS identified such cases by turning the complete captured lane, time and final placing RED. BUT....it only showed up in the "enter times by hand" option. The turning RED feature needs to be present for the 'get times from CTS', too. I missed several such DQ's. There could have been several devastated athletes who thought they were going to Nationals.