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Are you running an important Championship at your Club in the near future??
It’ll be quite well known in UK scoring circles that Datchet Radio Sailing use Parallel Scoring for the larger events. That is to say that, as we go, we score results simultaneously into two entirely separate systems in the interests of security and protecting competitor investment …and our hard earned Club reputation. You can lose both in the blink of an eye if something goes wrong.
There’s no point in parallel scoring if you don’t use entirely separate technologies. (We shall write more about Parallel Scoring later.) At the IOM Worlds we used HP and Dell Windows Laptops and a couple of ruggedised, military spec Android tablets. Always have at least two of everything!
We often use the laptops at the water’s edge, but for the IOM Worlds we kept them safely in a Clubhouse Office. For scoring at the line into the Parallel System, the Club has at least four android tablets.
We started with regular Samsung tablets, shrouded with Amazon bump proof and allegedly waterproof covers. Very nice, but not what we’ve ended up with.
For roughly the same money we have a couple of ruggedised tablets from a Hong Kong business called Oukitel. Definitely robust, no need for the protective covers and its IP68 water and dust resistant. Built for outdoors, when outside on a sunny day one appreciates the extra screen brightness. Mine has 620 nits… not that I know what that means! But it’s bright. The HP laptop by comparison is a devil to read outside on a sunny day.
We have two tablet sizes in use at Datchet – ten inch and eight inch screens. It’s a matter of personal preference. For Afleet HMS scoring specifically, my own preference would be the eight inch model.
the RT3 Plus model (8 inch) in the photo above has a simply massive 11000mah hour battery aboard. It can do a couple of days scoring at least. Good.
I thought I’d be neutral about it, but these military spec tablets have TWO on board SIM slots. Not that we need two, but the point is the Samsungs have no SIM slots at all. You have to join a phone hotspot or return to the clubhouse to connect to the world. If you are into sending scores to a WhatsApp group, or direct to your Club Website on Afleet connect – or for heat backups…. you’ll want an onboard SIM and do those tasks at the line as the heat comes to an end. We use Lebara (Vodafone) SIMS.
Totally unexpectedly – if you look carefully at the photo you will see that the RT3 Plus has a neat flat, wide hand strap on the back. It’s personal preference, but for scoring I find that a simply massive benefit. I even use the ends of the hand strap to include a neck cord (and Apple AirTag) for the times in between races.
Drawbacks – probably this applies to tablet technology in general. Despite being IP68 waterproof, rainwater on the screen can effect the software mapping of where your finger hits the screen. If it’s raining and there’s no shelter, we now slip the tablets into one of those normal waterproof A4 pads that most clubs use for scoring.
It’s only a couple of weeks since the IOM Worlds finished. We know at least two clubs that have, based on this experience, bought an Oukitel since the Worlds finished. No more Samsungs for us, I suspect.
Price? About the same price range as a Samsung ordinary tablet. Our 8 inch RT3 Plus was around 150GBPs in late 2025. Considerably less than a ruggedised Samsung, …. if you can find one these days. Cheap enough really to dedicate the tablet to scoring and allow nothing else in there.
What did you think of the Livestream video from the Gladstone Worlds?? Frankly, we all thought it was brilliant !! Talk about setting a high bar…..
There was a big determination for Datchet 2026 that we would somehow have to do Video coverage. The prime objective was to provide a showcase that would reach beyond current radio sailors, to the potential radio sailors of our future. There would be risks!!
We wanted two ways to do everything at the Championship, right?
So to give us backup for “Press Coverage” challenges we had a two pronged approach. For traditional yachting press coverage – perhaps addressing existing radio sailors first – we engaged the fantastic Mark Jardine of Yachts&Yachting and Sail-World fame. Mark had done a fabulous job of the Flying Fifteen Worlds in UK last year, so honestly it seemed an automatic choice. Our sport is notoriously challenging to photograph – but did you see the amazing shots that Mark was publishing? Go to the gallery on the Worlds website and see if you can pick out which photos Mark took. Really terrific …. More on Mark’s camera tech in a later website article. Mark has a great “TV” style too.
Probably the first thing you’d notice about the Gladstone Worlds coverage was the three person commentary team. They were wonderful. Heaven knows how Australia pulled that together. We had to be a lot more modest.
We had keen Datchet member, Nigel Barrow (www.nigelbarrow.co.uk). Nigel worked so, so hard on this to achieve what it took two or three people to do at Gladstone – and commentated his head off for about 8 hours a day, for six days. Most of us thought, “glad it wasn’t me”!! Hats off to Nigel – I’ve had only positive comments about the entire Livestream project. Nigel was the superb public face of it all.
Making Commentating Easier:-
One quick point : we shall write more about this in another article. Based on 2024-2025 trials of IOM live-streaming, strong feedback to our commentator was to make it more about people, less about sail numbers. Easy to say, difficult to do. Nigel worked like a trojan on this, but you cannot expect anybody to memorise 84 sail number to skipper name combinations plus boat colour identities…. in their head – well, not if you want the commentator to talk sanely at the same time.
So for Nigel and Mark we created a phone based “Commentator’s Assistance Tool” that they could hold in the left hand, scroll with the left thumb as they commentated …with microphone or binoculars in the right hand. The iPhone tool held all the competitor names, sail numbers, country codes and latest positions/scores to make the commentating more feasible, easier and interesting. If you watch Nigel in the videos, you’ll see him referring to the phone in his left hand simply most of the time. We generated the Commentators Assistance Tool from our Parallel Scoring systems using a little piece of unannounced future product, built specially for the Datchet IOM Worlds and for Nigel. More info on this in the coming days.
Money, Budget, Costs :-
If you are going to try Livestream at your next Championship, you’ll very quickly get to:-
available budget
supplier choice
Our initial budget contained nothing for Live-streaming. Given the group’s determination to get something on the air, we would have to treat the budgeting separately.
The supplier quotes we received varied by 200%-300% for the providing the same concept. Huge, simply huge variation , some of them – at the top end the quotes – were the same as the entire championship entry fees plus a quarter more. Not feasible. We had no spare money anyway.
We made an appeal and received some very kind and generous pledges of financial support from the MYA, from Clubs, and from Individuals specifically to support Live-streaming and Press Coverage to a new audience. The pledges covered about 70% of the predicted costs, so we decided to run with it.
The first financial point to make relates to UK VAT taxation. In the tax regime of your country, it may not apply. In UK, if you go to a large established business, 20% VAT tax is added to your bill. If you select a younger smaller, growing business,… before they need to be VAT registered (“SME”), …the 20% tax is not added. So we went to a quite young business called Evergreen Productions. We knowingly selected talent over experience.
It was for a team of 5-6 people onsite for the whole Championship. Bless them, they camped in the dinghy park to save budget. The original Livestream quote was still 125% of our budget. So what to do? Evergreen suggested that we could pseudo-livestream and cut maybe 40% of the cost. That’s what we did.
Instead of being “live” and on-air all the time like Gladstone and Croatia, the Evergreen concept was to edit content and upload to Youtube at the end each race (5 heats). They would need the Starlink satellite to do that. For myself, I feel that editing the race content down in size before broadcasting was a VERY sensible approach in the end. The boring bits were edited out.
That’s how our coverage proceeded. The “editing suite” became situated at Nigel’s motorhome (with Starlink installed), right next to the Webmaster’s van. There would be lots of footage to edit down each race at the van then get uploaded via Starlink. There were challenges in upload speed to the satellite – possibly due to our proximity to Heathrow airport. Late hours into the night were often needed for the upload to complete.
Cameras were in the main, fixed and land based. To fly drones at Datchet Water you need permission from Heathrow airport and also from the Royal Palace at Windsor Castle. In the end, the land based cameras were fine – used along the shore and way up in the Clubhouse crows nest.
Judging by feedback, Nigel and Evergreen did well.
It came in on budget!!! 🙂
We shall try to get Evergreen to give us some reflections later.
You may have heard that the Datchet Worlds’ general approach was to find two ways to do everything. In fact, if you could see two ways in operation it was probably because we couldn’t think of three!
It certainly applied to wifi and broadband provision for the site. Datchet Water is a private industrial location, storing one third of London’s Water, where day to day disruption can cause problems.
Our Championship was always going to be pretty dependent as regards online communications. If your Championship will be similar, where do you start??
Out on the Course:-
First off, out at the Race Courses and Finish Lines we have great signal strength on two of the three main national UK networks. We get good 5G too. You can look all this up in advance using provider online tools, then test it on your phones. What they don’t tell you about is network reliability.
As it happens, we know that the Datchet neighbourhood famously had a 4 hour outage in 2025 of its strongest network. Obviously, if that happened during Worlds Racing we would face a fair bit of calamity.
At the Race Control Van we had a Ryobi 5G system which seeks on the strongest available network. For the Race Team at the line, we would have enough capacity to keep going.
In the Clubhouse Scorers Office:-
A more complex situation…. You’d think that the normal Club Wifi would be fine, but history tells us that when the Clubhouse is full of visitors (we had maybe 150 on site on any day), the Clubhouse wifi has been known to hit a limit of 32 concurrent users. Did you know about that ?? Anyway, Club Management said, “Better get your own”.
(We also tested Wifi and Signal strengths in every room of the Clubhouse – amazing how it varied and in some rooms was zero. Don’t assume your clubhouse wifi reaches everywhere.)
For the IOM Nationals we ran using the Huawei 4G router (photo above) with two SIMS available in case of network failure.
What did we need this level of fallback for?
In scoring:-
our heat by heat backups were stored locally on USB sticks, but full race by race backups were transmitted via email, and also via the Microsoft OneDrive (cloud) system.
heat score sheets were arriving in the office via WhatsApp, plus we had our “Scoring Coach” full time on WhatsApp voice.
everyone wants online results, so those have to go out via the email transport to the website.
for both our scoring tablets, they have double onboard SIMs so they were covered… and we were exporting heat copies via AFleet EXPORT on the parallel scoring system.
You can’t have a Championship with no scoring results, can you?
Club Management were correct, of course !! Online performance was OK, but not blazingly fast. You do eat through the Gigabytes though. At the three day UK IOM Nationals we ate through about 20GB, so for the Worlds we bought second chunk of 45GB. (Not expensive but it lasts about 90 days)
That slight slowness, plus a 20 hour failure of MS OneDrive at the IOM Nationals made us extremely wary. (We shall write more about that later – but on Windows11, if you lose OneDrive, then you lose the email transport as well)
So from day two of the Worlds, we kept the Huawei switched on as backup, but moved across to a new satellite system – “Starlink” from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Simply amazingly good. Fast, stable and independent of mobile signal failures. The satellite dish was situated on the roof outside and the weatherproof cable led through the Scoring Office Window.
At the Worlds overall, the team in total were using a second Van based satellite Starlink for the Livestream video – plus a 5G service at the Worlds Website control van.
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 