First day at work

Today was my first day working the Nascar circuit. It is absolutely amazing the amount of television equipment that is committed to covering Nascar. The semi trailers that house all the production equipment are valued at between 5 and 20 million dollars each. At any given football game there will between 2 and 4 of them.

At the TV compound for the Daytona Race Week - there are currently 30 of these trailers parked and beginning the process of gearing up for the races. It's a sight to see (if you know what you're looking at).

What we do at the races is quite technically involved - much more so than football. We have 2 parts that we deal with.

The first part we deal with is the GPS/Telemetry portion. Without going into detail - basically it is a system that maps out the entire raceway with a GPS overlay that is accurate down to 2 cm (that's 5 inches)***see note at bottom of post. The actual GPS system that the department of defense supplied the world with is not that accurate. We improve it by setting up a couple of differential beacons (ground based GPS transmitter that does the same thing as a satellite does - except just for us). By having a fixed ground based unit - we can improve the triangulization tremendously and thus the accuracy.

Inside the overlay of the raceway, the cars each have a special GPS receiver and a transmitter that transmits the info back to us of exactly where it is in the overlay for the entire race. All of this requires an incredible amount of equipment and of course an amazing amount of brains to come up with.

Then, we use the same equipment that we use in football - to make the 'overlay' stay exactly in the same spot on camera - no matter if we're panning, tilting, zooming or focusing the camera.

Taking these 2 technologies and adding graphics to them allow us to have a marker follow any given car at any moment on camera. We have also expanded the use of this technology and you can also watch the cars in relation to each other in real time on some website somewhere during the race.

At the same time, we transmit all the performance info (speed, rpm, braking, temp, etc) about a car in real time which is fed to a lot of places. It's used periodically on TV, it's used by the racing teams, it's used on the internet and other places.

Anyway, that's the basics of it. It's amazing technology and so far - it's fun

***as my buddy Jeff 'O points out in the comment section below - my 'ciphering on the inch-to-centimeters things is leaving a little to be desired. The funny part is that I have converted inches to cm literally hundreds of times since I started importing helmets from Italy. The sizing there is in cm and most people measure their heads in inches. I've always multiplied inches times 2.54 to get the cm equivalent - SOOOO, when it came time to convert to inches from cm - I just fell back to my 'x 2.54' math.

The really cool thing is that for the purpose of this blog post - our accuracy is 2cm WHICH converts to 3/4 inch (DIVIDE by 2.54). So, our accuracy is pretty darn amazing.

Thanks for the correction Jeff. :)