Neat iPaq sighting at Chicago marathon

[BertBert]

My wife ran (well, actually she power-walked) the Chicago marathon this past Sunday. At the finish-line area there were a bunch of HP people wandering around with iPaq's with GPS cards plugged into them. You could go to them, tell them the bib number of a particular runner, and they could find where exactly on the course they were at that moment! For the uninitiated, each runner's time is measured by a chip that attaches to one of their shoes that starts measuring the time when they cross the start line and stops when they cross the finish line. Evidently they put some kind of GPS-enabled electronics in them at this race. So I thought that was kind of a cool application.

[mobileMike]

This doesn't make sense to me. How were they using the GPS card plugged into the the device? Usually they determine where you are, but in this case the HP people were letting you know where someone else was. I am positive this had nothing to do with the GPS card. The next question is where were they getting the information about the other runners from? My guess is the following.....

The chip on the runner's shoes did not have GPS capabilities. GPS uses way too much power. It was probably a lower power transmitter that register the runner when they passes specific check points along the race. The "GPS" cards you saw pluggend into the iPAQs were probably some sort of wireless networking card (WiFi connected to temporary access pont at finnish line, Bluetooth card connected to phone in pocket). Through this network connection, they will have access to all the runners' statistics.

/ mike