Timing Boxes

Catch rate

How many athletes a mat read, out of how many we can prove went past it. An athlete counts as proven only if a later split recorded them, or they finished. Somebody who vanished from the results entirely is never counted against a mat, because we cannot show they were ever there. That makes every number here a floor on real losses, never an overstatement: the true miss count can be higher than what is shown, never lower.

Box

One physical timing unit, identified by the box id the timing system assigns it. A box is what you drive out to and fix, which is why these pages group by box rather than by mat. One box commonly covers several splits at once (an aid station read on the way out and again on the way back, or a mat shared by two distances), so when it fails, it fails in several places simultaneously.

Record, and why it is ranked by the worst race

Each chip is one race, oldest on the left, so a row reads left to right as time passing. Boxes are ranked by their worst race rather than their average, on purpose. A box that is fine four times and dead once is a box that fails, and averaging that against its good days reports it as merely below par, which is the reading that leaves a broken unit in the equipment truck. Check Last raced before acting: a bad record with no race in two years is a retired box, not a current problem.

The verdicts

Each one names a different repair, which is the whole reason they are separate rather than one "unhealthy" label.

Never read

The box was assigned to a timing point and recorded nothing at all. It was never deployed, never powered, or never wired to its antenna. Nothing about its configuration is worth investigating until someone confirms it was physically switched on.

Stopped mid-race

It read for a while and then went silent while runners were still coming through it. That is a crash, a power loss, or a dead battery. Judged against the slowest transit anyone actually ran from this box to the next split, not a fixed timeout, so a box legitimately falling quiet after its last runner cleared is never accused of dying.

Weak

It read the whole time and simply missed most people, catching under 60% at its worst mat. This is antenna aim, antenna height, RF power, or mat placement. Rebooting it changes nothing, which is exactly why this is not lumped in with the two above.

Degraded

Between 60% and 90% at its worst mat. It worked, but it lost people. Worth a look at placement before the next race rather than a callout during this one.

Steady

90% or better at every mat it covered. Note that a box is steady regardless of when it stopped reading: falling quiet once the last runner has passed is what a working box does.

A verdict always describes a box's worst mat, not its average across mats. A box reading 99% outbound and 10% inbound has a serious problem at one of them, and averaging to 55% would describe a box that does not exist.