In June 2009, I helped the Dartmoor Radio Club to run the race communications for the Dartmoor Discovery Ultra-Marathon. As part of this, I developed some scripts which allowed the estimated location of each runner to be displayed in the communications centre in real-time. Used for this were:
- Excel spreadsheet, containing the times of arrival of each runner at the checkpoints. This information was supplied to the communications centre by FM link. Macros in other sheets in the spreadsheet then calculated the runner's estimated speed and therefore location.
- Google Earth, for displaying the positions of the runners.
- Visual Basic script for creating KML files for Google Earth from the spreadsheet. The KML output is set as a network link in Google Earth, updating every 15 seconds.
Some screenshots from the spreadsheet are shown below.
The actual Google Earth display used had a scanned-in OS Landranger map as an overlay. For copyright reasons, this cannot be reproduced here but I have reproduced (using genuine data from the race) the display without the overlay below. Click it to view full size.
