NCAA Tournament to use Precision Timing

[Camron Rust]

Originally Posted by crosscountry55

Not sure it would be, but my thought was that echoes from the whistle might be tricky. Also, in a regular arena, all of the electromagnetics are centered on the floor and bounded by the stands/walls, but in a football stadium the court is often offset around the 20 yard line with temp bleachers on one side, leaving the other half of the field dark and empty. Might be some interference or signal scattering from the timing pack's signal.

But there is probably an easy engineering solution or two to solve these problems, assuming they are even problems at all.

Echos don't matter. The whistle is only used to stop the clock. The system detects the initial sound of a whistle and sends a stop-clock command. If there is a second whistle, either from the same official or another official, the system will get another stop-clock signal...but already being stopped, it does nothing. Additionally, the echo probably wouldn't be loud enough to trigger the stop anyway. It is probably even immune to someone in the stands blowing a whistle. I'm guessing here, but, the microphone, being so close to the whistle, is probably very insensitive and wouldn't even register a whistle from 20' away.

The clock is started by a push button, not the whistle. And like the stopping action, multiple start commands don't cause a problem.


Interference, doubt it.