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RaceQs is not a starting or tactical application to help you during the race, it’s designed to allow you to record your sailing activities and review them afterwards – although others can review them in real time while you’re sailing.
Recording tracks is fairly simple, you just install the (free) App, register with an ID and password, add your boats by selecting your boat type (or add a custom one if not listed) and then start the recording in the App (or pre-set the start time). Log in to the website at raceqs.com to update your profile and add photos of you and yuor boat.
After the race, click to stop tracking and you can then upload the track to the website. From the website Journal you can replay the race in 3D using the Google Earth browser plugin. If you have a video camera recording your sailing (See Suckastick no-holes camera pole mount for $20 here) , you can also replay the RaceQs data alongside your video (aka GeoVids).
RaceQs will deduce the wind, VMG and mark locations from your track.
1) Wind direction. The app uses a rule based algorithm which assesses the likely wind direction based on the tacking / gybing angles and course shifts on close hauled POS (likely headers and footers). Estimated margin of error is about 3 – 5 degrees in the single boat mode and 1 degree with 5 or more boats are on the race course. This method of calculating VMG although not exact, incorporates the current impact and is more accurate than VMG toward wind without adjustment for the current.
2) Mark location. For the “stationary marks” we use NOAA database of all navigation marks in the US and we working to build such database worldwide. For the “temporary marks” the rule based engine “estimates” the mark location based on the boat(s) mark rounding pattern. The same logic as above a single boat will have about 95% accuracy rate guessing the mark location and with several boats on the race course it is 99 % accurate. Users can add, delete and modify mark location during the race replay as necessary. The key element for both wind direction and mark recognition is correct location of the start line, which needs to be provided by at least one boat either during the race or after the race during the race replay.
The start line tells the program: a. The fact that that a boat is in the race and we can utilize mark / wind recognition algorithm. b. The fleet – all the boats who crossed the line with you, therefore we can use multiple boats wind / mark detection.
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