No more audio tape

I had an old smartphone lying around and my digital tape was a pain at the last regatta, as I could not easily locate the bit of audio I wanted. I thought "There must be an app for this" and indeed there was. I thought it was very clever that I could record the finish and then re-name the file to "Race 3" or whatever.

However it got me thinking - why not video the finish with my smartphone and as well as the audio I would have the video? Well I did - and it worked wonderfully - except that I could not easily re-name these files. What was remarkable was that I could play it back and it showed the time - so locating a specific section of was relatively easy and I could zoom in on the boat at the far end and generally get a sail number.

The problems - well no one else was interested in having the data - with a cable it could have been downloaded to a fast computer and the results team could have scoured through for missing boats. The quality was stunning, particularly on a good monitor - but the organisation was not set up to take it

It ate the phone battery - although, as I was only doing finishes it coped each day but I was getting low battery warnings as we came ashore. So a spare or booster battery is probably a good idea,

It also ate up data - I have a 32gb card in the phone and it would not have held all the video for the entire regatta. I tried uploading it to YouTube but a single 6 minute finish took 10hrs to upload! So forget that idea unless you are working directly on a fibre network.

So now it's going to be mobile phones from now on - and I'm ordering a 128gb card!