Squadding question

[jdphotoguy]

We are lucky at our club since each squad is given a Nook that stays with the squad. That way we only need to add late folks once on the squad Nook.

For those of you saying, but what if the Nook breaks during the match, you'll lose one whole squad's scores. To you I say, range wide WiFi and I sync back scores every few minutes.

You do realize that you are risking a squad's entire match in having the Nook travel? If anything, anything at all happens to that Nook thta somehow renders the data irrecoverable, that squad has no match. If you have each stage keep the Nook on the stage, and the same catastrophe occurs, only that stage is lost and it is lost to all.

What part of, I sync all the the Nooks back to a secondary Master device every few minutes did you not understand.

[euxx]

I've never used the Walk-On feature... Not sure why I would want to... It seems like a disaster waiting to happen... Typing people's names in exactly correct at different stages is a bad idea...

Disaster is something you won't be able to recover from or lose data, but there you can edit those misspelled names at any times. Even at the very end on a master device after syncing all scores.

...It is a little scary to reset someone's score and not get an "are you sure" message.

Reset scores are kept in the history and can be restored from there. Also there is an automatic match backup is created (before this and few other operations, including pulling scores from other devices) and you can also enable text logs to be saved to sd card and use those to recover if things will go really wrong.

[Ty Hamby]

I'm glad I initiated a policy of no late arrivals shooting. Once registration closes you are SOL if you are late. I hope that policy continues in the future

Our club has the same policy. I turned a shooter away who arrived 10 min late. I later learned he had been up half the night and was stuck in surgery (he is a doctor) and was unable to get away any sooner.

I have felt horrible ever since.

I will never turn away another shooter ever again. I will do my best to find a way to make it work. Repeated offences I am sure would be handled differently.

[Jim Norman]

We are lucky at our club since each squad is given a Nook that stays with the squad. That way we only need to add late folks once on the squad Nook.

For those of you saying, but what if the Nook breaks during the match, you'll lose one whole squad's scores. To you I say, range wide WiFi and I sync back scores every few minutes.

You do realize that you are risking a squad's entire match in having the Nook travel? If anything, anything at all happens to that Nook thta somehow renders the data irrecoverable, that squad has no match. If you have each stage keep the Nook on the stage, and the same catastrophe occurs, only that stage is lost and it is lost to all.

What part of, I sync all the the Nooks back to a secondary Master device every few minutes did you not understand.

If you actually do that, I assume you have wifi that covers your range. most don't and if others follow 'the Nook travels with the squad' method, they are taking a risk. I can only wish we had wifi at the range, I wish we had power, water and a lot of other things there as well.

[jdphotoguy]

Jim Norman, I setup two APs, one at either end of the range, as we use 2 bays on one end of our property and 4 at the exact opposite end.

This covers the bays, so regardless where I am, I can sync all the Nooks back to my iPhone and/or Nexus 7.

We are lucky to have power, but for our big USPSA match once a year, with 10 stages and 250+ competitors, over three days, I add two more APs and power those two APs using batteries. The batteries last all day and could probably last a few days without recharging, but I recharge them every night.

[pcarst]

Once Ken's update comes out, we should be able to handle late arrivals much easier. Until then, we handle the shooters as follows:

* USPSA and our TimePlus 3-Gun matches are required to be pre-registered. Up until JAN 1, 2016, non-preregistered shooters are given the evil eye by stats (that "eye" has resulted in about a 95% success rate!) but she puts them in and we send out an announcement over the PA to "Stages Please Synch your Ipads". We do not squad and shooters have a 90 minute window from the published start time to show up to shoot. Current plans are to enforce pre-registration or don't shoot next year. With Ken's update, we may not need that.

* Tuesday Night Steel has a signup window from 3-7pm and we have over 200 shooters. No way pre-registration will work nor can we send out Synch PA announcements every 5 minutes. As a result, we cannot use PS. Again, once the push update is available, we may be able to use it.

* Large matches such as Area II and WSSSC are not a problem since everyone is pre-registered.

[wgnoyes]

...

* Large matches such as Area II and WSSSC are not a problem since everyone is pre-registered.

You sure about that? I had the MD come up to me on sunday morning before at a state championship to get me to register a new shooter who was associated with a match sponsor.

Edited November 6, 2015 by wgnoyes

[pcarst]

LOL, Damn those MD. Life in stats would be so much easier without them!

Yes, there are always exceptions. We just deal with them, don't we.

[Jim Norman]

you don't squad? I cannot imagine a match where we wander from stage to stage without some regimentation. We don't squad in the Nooks, keeps the squads form having to flip pages, we have a nook per stage, it stays on the stage and the shooters are pulled from the ALL SHOOTERS list.

Seriously, how does one get a walk-though? How does one know where to start and finish? Don't you wind up with 20 people all wanting to shoot stage 3 and on one on stages 2 & 4? (as an example)

I cannot imagine the confusion that would have ensued Sunday with 7 stages and 73 shooters if we just told them, head out and shoot where you want. Do you have dedicated ROs?