Knowledge base

Digit height is the only number that matters here, and each step roughly doubles the money:

Measure from where the board will stand to the back row of the seating, not the front. A board that the front row can read and the back row cannot will generate more complaints than no board at all.

One more consideration: a single-line board toggles between values, a dual-line board shows two at once. On a bracket program where the crowd wants ET and dial-in together, dual line saves the toggle.

Choose wireless when there is no conduit down the track, when the system has to move between events, or when the install budget will not stretch to trenching. Track electronics report to the console over the T-Link link, so the only cable is the one to power.

Choose hardwired when the conduit already exists, when the installation is permanent and nobody will ever pack it up, or when the site has heavy radio traffic that you would rather not share.

The two are not exclusive. The 3000A runs both at once and that is the point of it: a hardwired ethernet run and a wireless controller, live together, so losing either one does not stop the event.

If you go wireless and the tower is inside a building or the run is long, plan for antennas at the same time rather than after the first event.

Each split is a separate beam position, so each one is a real cost and a real thing to set up on race day.

• 60 foot is the one racers ask for first. It is where a launch is won or lost, and a bracket racer will tune to it all season.
• 330 foot is the standard incremental in the middle of the short end. On an 1/8 mile program it is the most useful split after 60ft.
• Mid-track covers ET and speed at the middle position where the class calls for it.
• 1000 foot matters on a 1/4 mile strip; it is the last data point before the finish and is what a sanctioned program is expected to publish.
• End of track ET and speed is not optional. That is the timeslip.

A weekly program can run happily on 60ft plus end of track. A sanctioned strip is generally expected to have the full set.

Start with the corners: that is where a driver needs the call earliest and where a flagman standing trackside is hardest to see. Four lights covers a typical short oval.

Then walk the track and look for the places where a driver cannot see the next light. A back straight with a crest, a corner with a bank of trees behind the flagstand, an infield that hides the tower. Those blind spots are where the next lights go.

Size the light to the viewing distance:

The system takes more lights later without changing what is already installed, so starting with the corners and adding is a reasonable plan.

The emitter and the sensor face each other across the lane. Lane widths up to 50 feet are supported, and the beam is encoded infrared so sunlight and radio traffic do not trigger it.

Three things cause most alignment problems:

1. Height. The beam must catch the car, not the track. Foam stands raise the emitter and sensor from 1 to 6 inches off the surface, which also keeps them out of standing water and away from debris.
2. Movement. Anything a car can nudge will eventually be nudged. The stands are foam for exactly that reason - they give rather than destroying the electronics.
3. Drift. Check alignment at the start of the day, after any incident, and after anything is moved to sweep the track.

If you are running the 3040A emitter and sensor combo, only a passive reflector goes on the far side of the lane, so there is half as much to align and nothing to charge over there.

The single most common cause of a marginal link is an antenna inside a building. A tower with metal siding or a concrete press box will absorb most of the signal before it reaches the track.

In order of what to try:

1. Get the antenna outside. The outside antenna mount kit relocates it with 20 feet of cable and a universal bracket. This fixes more problems than anything else.
2. Point it. For long or awkward runs, the high gain flat panel antenna is directional with 12dBi of gain. Aim it down the track rather than mounting it flat.
3. Raise it. Height beats power. Getting above the crowd, the vehicles and the fencing does more than a bigger antenna at head height.

A full-length strip with the tower at one end will usually want more than one antenna kit. Three is not unusual on a sanctioned installation.

Beam emitters use removable USB rechargeable battery packs, good for 55 to 60 hours per charge. That is several race days, but the failure mode is always the same: nobody charged them and the pack dies mid-round. Keep a second set charged and swap rather than waiting.

Safety lights and displays take 10 to 14VDC, or mains through an adapter. A 6750 draws about 1.2A, a 6752 about 2.3A. If you are running lights off a battery at a corner with no power, size the battery for the whole day plus margin, and check it between events rather than during one.

Consoles run from 12VDC, 110VAC or 230VAC.

If you have a lot of battery packs, the desktop charger takes eight at once and charges each independently, so one flat pack does not slow the others down.

In the tower is the simple arrangement: the printer sits next to the console and connects with a 9-pin to RJ45 adapter. Slips are torn off in the tower and handed down or collected.

Trackside puts the printer where the drivers actually pull off. The printer talks to a wireless RS232 unit, which links back to the console, so there is no cable between the two. It needs mains power at the printer end.

The trackside arrangement is what a busy program usually ends up with, because the alternative is somebody walking slips down between every pair.

The printer itself is the same either way, and ships with the serial interface, ribbon and paper.

RA Command Drag (3128C) is full tower race management for drag racing: class and driver registration, practice, qualifying and eliminations with 64-car NHRA style ladders, scoreboard control and timeslip customisation. It controls the timing system rather than sitting beside it. Supplied with a one hour remote training session.

RA Command AutoCross runs an autocross or solo event from one Windows app: live timing off the 3850 hardware timer, a run order that cycles drivers and enforces the run cap, registration, and class plus overall PAX standings ranked live. It works fully offline.

RA Monitor - Drag is deliberately much less. It is a scoreboard and a logger for an existing 2650: it displays both lanes and writes every run to a daily spreadsheet file, and it never sends a command to the timer. If you want PC control of the tree and the sensors, that is a Command Drag system, not a Monitor one.

All three are Windows desktop applications that run locally, with no cloud account and no connectivity needed at the venue.

The timing console is a complete system. It times the run, drives the tree, and prints a timeslip without any computer attached. A night can be run entirely from the keypad, and if the PC fails mid-event the hardware carries on.

What a PC adds is everything around the run: who is entered, what class they are in, which pair is next, what the ladder looks like after this round, and what the standings are when the last car crosses.

The practical rule is that programs with classes and eliminations want a PC, and test-and-tune or open practice generally does not.

You supply the PC. Windows 10 or 11.

The connection is serial. On RA Monitor the port settings are locked to the only mode the 2650 uses - 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, one stop bit - so there is nothing to configure beyond picking the COM port and pressing Connect.

A modern laptop with no legacy serial port takes a USB-to-serial adapter, and the software re-scans for ports while it is running, so you can plug the adapter in after starting the application.

If the PC is not next to the console, a wireless data link carries the connection instead of a cable. That is the same idea as the trackside printer: the port moves, the settings do not.

When something is not connecting, the status indicator tells you which end is at fault before you start swapping cables.

Three settings decide how an autocross event scores, and all three live in one place:

• Cone penalty. Set the seconds per cone your club uses. Penalised times recalculate everywhere they appear, so a correction after the fact does not mean rebuilding the results.
• Scoring mode. Best Single takes the fastest penalised run. Sum of Best totals all counting runs. This is switchable per event.
• Runs per competitor. The run limit is enforced automatically, counting runs already recorded, and the run order cycles drivers to the back of the queue until they have taken their allotted runs.

PAX indexing is applied per class for cross-class comparison. A starter set of SCCA-style classes - Street, Street Touring, Street Modified, Novice, Fun/Exhibition - is seeded on first launch and is fully editable for your sanctioning body and season.

1. Look at the beam path. A cone, a puddle, a piece of debris or a marshal standing in the wrong place will block it. This is the most common cause and the quickest to rule out.
2. Check the emitter has power. The battery packs run 55 to 60 hours, which means the one that dies is the one nobody charged. Swap in a charged pack rather than testing the flat one.
3. Check alignment. The emitter has a spotlight beam pattern to make this easier. Re-aim it at the sensor and watch for the beam to register.
4. Check the height. If the stands have been knocked, the beam may be passing over or under the car.

If the system has an activity log, read it. A cable or wiring fault shows up as bad data on the line rather than as silence, which distinguishes a broken connection from a blocked beam.

A link that worked and then stopped usually means something physical changed between the two ends. Transporters parked in a new spot, a new building, a crowd where there was open ground, or the antenna knocked out of aim.

Work outward from the tower:

1. Is the antenna still outside, still pointed the right way, still connected?
2. Has anything large appeared in the line of sight?
3. Is the far end powered and awake?

For a long or obstructed path, a directional flat panel antenna aimed down the track will hold a link that an omnidirectional antenna cannot.

Systems built for redundancy handle this differently: with both a hardwired network and a wireless controller live at once, losing the wireless path does not stop the event, which is the entire argument for that configuration on a professional program.

With up to four cars on course and a single start/finish beam, finishes are recorded to the oldest car in the queue. That is right almost every time, and wrong when a car is passed, pulls off, or is waved through.

The fix is a reassignment, not a recalculation. From the live feed you can reassign a mis-matched finish to the correct slot, record a DNF for a car that did not complete, or DQ a time that should not count - a pass that invalidated the field, or a missed beam.

Runs can also be added, edited or deleted by hand, which covers backup timing and protests.

The important part is that the corrections happen in the moment, from the screen you are already looking at, rather than in a scoring pass at the end of the day.

A system that refuses to start is often doing its job. Work out which:

• Guard beam. If a guard beam is fitted and broken, the system will not allow a start. That prevents deep staging, and it is behaving correctly.
• Staging. If pre-stage and stage are not both satisfied for a lane, the tree will not run.
• Autostart. Programmable autostart by class can hold a start until its conditions are met.

If none of those apply, check that the tree has power and that the starter's pushbutton is connected - on a DTSS installation the handheld pushbutton is what launches the tree, and a 50 foot cable is easy to unplug during a teardown and forget to reconnect.

The USB rechargeable packs used by beam emitters give 55 to 60 hours and recharge in about two hours. The habit worth building is charging at the end of an event rather than the start of the next one, because that is the day you discover a pack has failed rather than the day you need it.

Cold weather draws batteries down faster. Winter events - snowmobile and ice racing especially - should plan on extra charge cycles and a warm place to keep spares.

The eight-bay desktop charger gives the same charging power to one pack or eight, with no trickle overcharge damage, so packs can live in it between events.

The hand controller battery runs about 140 hours per charge and takes two hours to recharge.

Timing equipment is more likely to be damaged in transit than in use. A molded carrying case with custom foam holds the console, sensors, emitters, printer, cables and adapters, and keeps them from moving against each other.

Displays and scoreboards want their own cases: metal reinforced corners and edges, metal hinges and locking latches, with high density foam inserts. That case doubles as a shipping case if a board ever has to go back for service.

Cable is worth managing properly. A cable bucket takes up to 660 feet of heavy track cable with both ends accessible, so it comes out without tangling; a reel handles Cat5 style cable up to 300 feet and takes several runs on one winder.

Store batteries charged, and store everything dry.

The XL line is designed so that a program can grow into a larger system without replacing its infrastructure. Track electronics, scoreboards and software hooks are shared, which means the usual additions are genuinely additive:

• More splits on the same console
• Bigger or additional scoreboards
• Win lights and dial-in boards
• More safety lights on an existing flagging system
• PC race management on a console that has been run from the keypad

What does not carry over is a change of console family, and the honest answer there is that it depends on which model you have and what you are trying to add.

If you are planning a season or two ahead, tell us where you expect to end up and we will make sure what you buy now does not have to be thrown away later.

Extended warranty service to 12 months is available for timing systems and for scoreboards, and is quoted alongside the equipment.

If something needs attention, call first. A good proportion of what looks like a hardware fault turns out to be alignment, power or a setting, and that is a phone call rather than a shipping cost. When something does need to come back, we will tell you what to send - often the console rather than the whole system.

Keep the case the equipment shipped in. The display cases in particular are built to double as shipping cases.

Have your model numbers ready when you call. They are on the label on each unit, and on the manual for that product.