Live Tracker www.minurada.eeMinu Rada is an application, which is used in sports competitions for tracking the competition in real time. Mostly for locating sailing yachts in open sea regattas. The tracking is carried out online. There are special positioning devices put on yachts, which send information to the map application after a certain period of time. This allows to track the event and related statistics in real time. The viewer can see a Google based map, where the routes of each yachts are marked. The map also consists of sea navigation marks. The table shows the rank, name of the boat, speed and distance. It is possible to watch the track of competition after the race. The tracker helps the athletes to analyze the process of the competition and look back at the most intriguing parts.
Positioning device
The main problem with this application is that the positioning devices work on batteries and therefore their working time is limited. In yachts, it is possible to load the batteries using the power source of the boat. But on long open sea regattas the teams want to reserve the boat batteries just in case if something happens, they do not want to load the positioning device and spend the battery power. Therefore these devices should have batteries which last longer of use some other power resource.
As the sailing race organizers started using this live tracker device during this summer, there are still a lot of improvements that needs to be done. The application could be made visually more attractive, design specialists should be involved. It also sometimes happens, that the application frozes, which could be annoying. Another addition I would suggest is that the terms like knots, seamarks and other should be explained for the application users. Maybe it would attract also people, who are not personally involved in sailing and are not familiar with the culture and terms. If the application is made more attractive, faster and user-friendly, it could be one of the best sources to introduce sports, which can not be easily tracked on spot, like regattas and long distance marathons, etc.
