GPS tracking of Team Ford Ranger at Ukatak

Rob / 25.01.2002

They might be out in the snowy wastes of Quebec, but the wonders of modern technology mean that right now you can see how Team Ford Ranger are doing at the Raid Ukatak.

Like all the competing teams they are carrying a GPS which is being tracked on the race web site. It’s a remarkable way of following the progress of an expedition race half way across the world. On a course map its possible to see the team’s movements and speeds relative to each other. So you can see where teams take different routes or get lost, how long they stay at checkpoints and where they gain or lose time against their nearest competitors. (They got seriously lost trying to find CP4!)

From the Ukatak website you open up the software and see a course map in a special viewer. Downloading the maps and data takes a while, but its worth the wait. Around the map are a series of controls, including a VCR style stop, go, rewind function. You decide which teams you want to track, hit go, and can then follow their progress. As you do so a race time and real time clock run. It takes a while to figure out how everything works, but its quicker if you read the instructions which are cunningly hidden on the window you open the software from! (You have to have Java Script enabled on your browser – and if you haven’t turned it off chances are it will be.)

The technology was developed by Canadian company Competitio who are based in Montreal. It’s previously been used on Raid the North (another big Canadian race) and was also how Discovery Channel kept tabs on some teams at last years World Championship race in Switzerland. Hopefully it will be used at even more races this year.