For those of you using or investigating the Air+ controls, some testing was recently done using a BS-11 station and the SIACs ( SPORTident active Cards).

The O-Lynx Radios, OLC-03, which are fitted with the SRR USB Dongle were used for the testing as these are capable of receiving the punch information broadcast by the SIACs. This is the main difference over standard SRR controls as its the SI card that’s sending the punch time to O-Lynx, not the Control station.

The Air+ system is ideal for Mountain bike and other sports where it is more difficult to punch the standard SPORTident controls.

Update 11/09/2014 – Further testing

While the touchless side of the SIAC’s is interesting and useful for certain applications, its the SIAC’s abilities to transmit punch information that perhaps has the most potential. The touchless BS11 stations can be setup to ask the cards to transmit all recent punches. This means that while you may only have 4 O-Lynx radios on a course, as the competitor passes by the radio, the split times for the punches before it are also sent back to the events centre. This makes every control a virtual ( delayed ) radio.

Another example would be score or rogaine type courses where again only a few radios are out on the map, but live scoring and route choice can be delivered to the event centre as competitors pass the radio controls. For MTB Enduro events certain start and finish points are likely to be out of range, but with radios at points in the course where they can reach, intermediate results can still be picked up as riders pass, or used as early warnings as they get near a certain point.

I’m sure there are a lot more examples where this feature can prove useful.

See air.sportident.us for further information on Air+

AirplusSM