There are several options in configuring RaceBase. Tap on the Menu button on your PalmPilot, tap on the Options menu, and then tap on Settings:
The Settings window will appear:
The options you have are explained here:
Distance: This is the distance of the race, which will affect only the printout of the pace in the final results. If the pace is a meaningless number for your race (because it's a triathlon or other multistage race, or for some other reason), set the distance to zero, and the pace printout will be eliminated. The units for distance can be set to miles, kilometers, yards, meters, or feet.
Pace Units: Pace units can be set to minutes per mile, minutes per kilometer, miles per hour, kilometers per hour, minutes per 100 yards, or minutes per 100 meters. Again, this doesn't affect the actual results, only the printout or display of the pace.
Scoring: There are two completely different types of scoring supported by RaceBase - Road, which sets normal road race scoring, and XC, which configures the software for standard cross-country scoring. In road race scoring, entrants are scored according to all the different age groups (or other categories like Clydesdale, etc.), and in addition by overall placing for all entrants (both sexes) and overall by sex as well. In cross-country scoring, the "category" of a racer is no longer their age group, but rather their team name, and there are only two sets of scores - individual (overall results for all racers), and team, in which the places of the top five runners for each team are added together to give the score for the team, and only the top seven runners for each time count for purposes of placing. You'll want to set this setting before the race starts, although if you make a mistake, you can change it and re-score the race with no affect.
Name of Event: The name of the event is simply a "label" which appears on the top of the results when they are output (either sent to a desktop computer or printed). The name of the event can be a maximum of 31 characters long.
Event Date: The date is likewise simply a "label" which appears on the output. It is a standard Palm "date selector", which means you just tap on it and select the correct date from the pop-up calendar.
Separator for Data Export: When the data are transferred to the PalmPilot Memo Pad (from where you can HotSync it to a desktop computer), or sent out the serial port directly to another computer (see Chapter 7), the different columns of information (name, time, place, etc.) can be separated either by tabs or commas, whichever is most useful for the software (e.g., Excel) into which you will be importing the results on the other computer.
Cross-country races involve two concepts - the number of racers who "score" for any time, which is usually 5, and the number of racers who "place" for the purposes of displacing runners from other teams, which is usually 7. When you tap the XC setting in the Settings window (whether it was already selected or whether it wasn't), a new window will pop up:
This window allows you to adjust the number of "scorers" and "placers" to different numbers, as is sometimes appropriate for very small races.
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