What a great service to the hang gliding and paragliding
communities

I've been interested and involved in live tracking for
competitions for fifteen years. For example, David Glover and I started out
attempting to make APRS (2 meter radio tracking) work with competitions in
Florida. See here: http://ozreport.com/3.19#0 and here:
http://ozreport.com/3.20#1.

Currently I use a Livetracker24,
http://www.livetrack24.com/store/index#trackers, a SPOT device, 
http://www.findmespot.com/en/, and my Android/Samsung phone with various
software solutions including Gaggle,
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geeksville.gaggle and
Airtribune, http://airtribune.com/.

I have tested hardware and software in the US and Australia to determine
reliability in remote areas and found spotty service no matter what solution I
used. Therefore I use them all to gain reliability through redundancy. My driver
very much appreciates this, and I don't really have to rely on a radio any more.

I got interested in Airtribune after seeing how well it worked in Rodanillo in
January 2014, http://airtribune.com/pre-world-2014. This was by far the best view of any
race I had seen. The fact that it was updated every two seconds really gave you
a good idea of what was going on.  I could click on just a few pilots in
the lead and get rid of the additional clutter.

I contacted Airtribune about the possibility of using their free-to-us solution
for live tracking the 2014 Big Spring Nationals as I saw what high quality their
service was. I had followed other races (for example, the PWC in Sun Valley) and
knew that there would be problems with live tracking and didn't want to pay for
a service that I thought might not work that well out in west Texas.

It was great working with Elena Filonova at Airtribune as we struggled to get
every pilot registered at Airtribune. Very fortunately, once pilots register the
first time on Airtribune's site they don't have to fill in all their information
again for each competition. They just click on the new competition that they are
registering for. Airtribune requires that you use their registration system for
your competitions. We didn't because we had already setup our registration
system, so it was a bit of a hassle to get pilots to also register on
Airtribune. But, for the most part they did.

The Airtribune app that transmits your position to the Airtribune servers only
runs on Android phones, not on iPhones. Hopefully this will change in the
future. This is a much better solution than dedicated trackers, as the mass
produced smart phones provide much greater capabilities (the ability to store
flight data points and then send them when going in and out of service, for
example).

So we were limited at the 2014 Big Spring Nationals to only those pilots who had
Android phones,
http://airtribune.com/bigspring2014/results, which was a minority. Still
fans watching the competition were excited by what they saw. They supplemented
Airtribune with the SPOT-based and free to use Flytrace
http://www.flytrace.com/tracker/map.aspx?group=156 when pilots were not
updating on Airtribune as they went out of cell tower range. I was also
transmitting on Livetracker,
http://www.livetrack24.com/user/davisstraub.

After the fact Elena took the track logs from Soaring Spot,
http://soaringspot.com/2014bsn/
each night, and provided Replay for each day here:
http://airtribune.com/bigspring2014/results. These results are just
fantastic. Pilots can go back and see how they did relative to the other pilots
in the competition. (I would just add the possibility for even further increases
in play back speed to 40 and 100 times.)

AirTribune also features simple blogging about the event as it is going on.
Elena worked with us using FaceBook Messenger to post photos and brief comments
about the task, the conditions, and the site. We felt that was a useful
supplement to viewing the race itself.

So far Airtribune is the best cell tower based tracking system that we have
used. It's not perfect, but it got a lot of folks watching that would not have
otherwise. We promoted it heavily in Big Spring so that the folks there could
see what all the fuss was about. It was one of the ways we gave back to the
town.