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.