I could be wrong but you never mentioned the server side where all laps are registered and even race results if AMB race software was used.

I mentioned the support of the whole system. Live lap timing is but one of the features.

From a cost to racer point of view (this has been briefly covered earlier in the thread) 10 key ‘hand counting’ with numbers clearly affixed to the car is the way to go.

this is not to difficult to do but generally requires a second person in race control to count the laps. When i race directed back in the late 90’s we ran this way. The draw back is that laps could get missed if people got distracted.

for club racing the .5 second that can be missed with hand counting does not matter, larger events need the accuracy of the transponder loop.

the ease (as stated earlier) of the transponders counting laps is very nice for the race director.

to the original title of ‘is there a transponder hack’ nope (for all the reasons stated above.

i have heard from people i know who run/bike that there are ‘passive systems’ that are much cheaper for the individual (given out in the event bibs) but the counters are exponentially more expensive.

We hand counted for quite a while in our club. Our club was run by one of the nicest gentleman you could ever meet and his name was Dennis. You bought your "transponders" from him, he would sell you a set of 10 for $5 or so. They were puffy dots that you affixed to the outside of your car on the hood using the supplied velcro. You got 10 different colors and Dennis had his 10 computer keyboard number keys colored. He was amazing, I can't remember him ever missing a lap no matter how many people were running. He was affectionately referred to as Dennis and his Dots. But when we went to AMB, my OCD really kicked in because now I had a very accurate account of my lap times which allowed me to over analyze everything. :D

The other system that is used by a few tracks and much cheaper is iLap. It is IR based. The decoder is a few hundred dollars and the transponders are about $35. Is it cheaper than MyLaps? Yes, on a per unit basis. But given it requires line of sight, mounting it in each car is more involved than a MyLaps transponder. My local track uses iLap, so I’ve got to have the transponder either mounted outside the body or through a windshield pointing straight up to be read properly. With MyLaps, I’d be more open to just using one transponder and move it between cars as I don’t need as critical a mounting setup. With iLap, I have transponders for each car since it’s too much of a pain to swap between and get them reading consistently. And if they are mounted on top of the body, they are more likely to be damaged and need to be replaced. So, is it really cheaper than MyLaps? No.

We had a learning curve with ilaps. Now we are able to mount the PT almost anywhere (low on the chassis, sometimes under the painted hood, usually in same location as amb/mylaps) and it will still read accurately. Maybe the key to ilaps is on how the readers on the overhead bracket are installed.

I cannot tell the difference if I have ilaps or mylaps/amb on my car :)

The support of the hardware where they only release updates that will make their older transponders obsolete?

That's been mentioned many times already. I was talking about something else.

As a designer of the whole system they have the right to do that to rule out others copying transponders in a bad way. It is not nice but the step was already set over a decade ago with a transponder exchange program which still exists. Somehow people can complain about this one in more than a decade action but easilly buy new cars, radio equipment, motors and tires every year.

This is actually right in my wheel house. I ran a timing software company for about 17 years and we were a distributor for MyLaps, as well as others. We had about 1600 customers paying about $750/months for our software in 70 different countries. Go karts, motocross, full size race tracks, shit even the Nurburgring used us.

Across all of those sports, Mylaps was always the heavy hitter. It cost the most by a long shot but man was it reliable. It was also good over 300mph which most wouldn't touch. There's nothing particularly innovative about it until you get into the big money stuff, GPS tracking, having 20 loops on your track, automated light controls, a central server to track all the decoders and ancillary devices. None of that really matters to RC.

There are tons of other viable timing hardware companies. Tag Heuer, DeHaardt, Pixel, LapSnapper, Race Result, Apex, Alien RFID.... All of them work, none of them were as reliable as MyLaps. I can tell you from the millions of laps our customers logged we hardly ever got a support call from a MyLaps customer. But they're still over priced mainly because of the market penetration they have. No track is going to alienate themselves by not having a ML decoder onsite. The only one I would think would have a shot at eating into their market is the RFID guys. Xponders are seriously $2 a pop and they're a small sticker you slap on the car. They're super resilient too. Only downside is you need an over head gantry for the antenna, doable but not idea. But at $2 a piece you could just give them a sticker with their entry fee. With all that said, that's just the hardware, there's a ton of software to manage race days, registration, live timing over web sockets, scoreboards, top times, yada yada yada...

Aside from the radio every single item you mentioned is a wear and tear item, to which some would even argue the sensors do wear out. I actually don’t see many racers buying radios every year but even if they did they don’t have to buy a new radio for every car they own.

Radios wear out quicker than a transponder. Potentiometers don't last forever.

Where did I say radio's, I did say radio equipment. Every year a new car and with that for sure new servo's and maybe a new receiver and some even every year a new transponder.

I only complain about it because it made the amb house transponder set obsolete.

Those of us that are already into racing, $110 for a transponder doesn't seem terrible. But to a dad that want to try racing with his 2 kids on the weekends, it adds a huge expense.

I've got a couple ideas to solve the expensive transponder issue.


1. Build an open source decoder that will read mylaps transponders as well as open source transponders. Hardware cost could be brought down significantly.

2. Live time supports running multiple loops, will it support running 2 different decoders doing this? Could you run mylaps and trackmate at the same time?

3. Custom firmware for the mylaps decoders to open them back up to detect older transponders.

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