Setting up a swooping entry gate question

[Pablo.Moreno 0]

At my DZ we just create a swooping course.
W were trying to brain storm on how to set up a kind of device that would let us know if we made the entry gate or not.
We came up with many ideas, but not all of them are as practical as we want them to be.
We are trying to come up with an idea were we don't need a person standing there and judging if we made the entry gate or not.
So, I would like to know what kind of system other DZ use for this kind of set up.
Thanks

[inertial 0]

On our dropzone we use a very simple and cheap gate sensor. A member of our club who is an electronics engineer built it. He bought the parts in an "everyday" electronics store.
If you look at the picture you can see the construction. It's simply two wood bars covered with pool noodles. On one of the bars there's a reflector. On the other one the light beam. The light beam is connected to a small box which has ten 1500mA batteries (rechargeable- last two weekends if switched off at the end of the day) in it and a beeper. On the box are also 2 LEDs- one indicates that the device is switched on the other one indicates that there's a "light beam connection".
Setting it up is easy. You just have to switch it on, adjust the light beam and then "arm" it (switch the beeper on).
The whole device (including pool noodles...) costed 110 Euros.

[dragon2 0]

You do need 2 switches though, because we found a number of people could go underneath the 1.5m poles (ie, not trip the switch) and still not touch the ground (including quite tall jumpers like JC) and canopy lines only do not trip the switch (at least, not ours).

And as a sidenote, we had to turn off the beeper in our landing field as the (pretty far away) neighbours started complaining after a while

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[d100965 0]

I make electronic swoop gates and I have a set for sale in the misc section of the classifieds.

I have a demo video on youtube:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHEiqkURL0

and here is a video of me swooping them in Empuria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veEyO0TqjfY&feature=related
if you forward to the end and pause you can see them set up.
As you swoop through them you break the sensor beam and a 112db siren goes off for up to 10 seconds to let you know you made them (or not).

p.s. What Dragon2 says is correct, you can technically go under the beam and the sensor will miss you. Although IMO this is very rare.
Brian Vacher uses a set of my gates to train on and I've had no reports of misses from him going under in the last 3 years. IMO, I believe a lot of misses attributed to "going under" are actually down to the response time of the sensor being too slow and it actually missing a very fast swooper. You need a sensor with a response time faster than approx 5 milli seconds to avoid this. (My gates have a very fast response time, 500 micro seconds).

Also I don't believe there is any sensor available in the world today that will trigger on the canopy lines only. So if you do actually go under the beam then it will miss. At least some part of the swooper has to go through.

[dragon2 0]

Quote

p.s. What Dragon2 says is correct, you can technically go under the beam and the sensor will miss you. Although IMO this is very rare.

Our system is plenty fast, it's been used for a lot of "official" swoop competitions over the years. It probably depends on which swoopers compete, and the aim is to hit the gates highest you can, but during a couple European/Dutch Swoop Tour competitions (and training) we did have a number of confirmed go-lows (confirmed on video) so we changed to sets of 2 sensors.

For training a go-low isn't so bad IMO, since you know you hit the gate but during a competition..?

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[Pablo.Moreno 0]

Thank you guys, we are going to be discussing what is going to work better for us.
Once we are done, I will post what we did and how is working.