Tracking the Celtman

Written 20/06/17

durtytracking GPS tracker Durtytracking provide a GPS Tracker system which allow organisers of outdoor events to keep track of the location of the participants in real time and display this on a map. Last Saturday (17th June 2017) this was used for the Celtman Extreme Scottish Triathlon 2017 in Wester Ross, Scotland.

Celtman logo The triathlon started with a 3.5km swim across a cold sea loch, followed by a 202km cycle along highland roads, and finished with a 42km run over two Munros.

In the past Durtytracking have used Ordnance Survey's OpenSpace map server for displaying some the maps however this year they turned to The Hug and their map server which serves WayMaps tiles which are similar in style to Ordnance Survey.

As Andy Upton of Durtytracking explained:

The problem with OpenSpace is that you are nominally limited to 65,000 map tiles per day with a hard limit of 100,000 tiles and at a busy event we often exceed that so in the past we have had restrict access to OpenSpace to event management and other limited distribution and leave the public using Google Maps.

Using The Hug means we could provide everyone with high quality base maps, which I think are in several ways are an enhancement on OS 1:50 000

In the screen shot below, taken early in the day when the competitors were close together, you can see a marker for each of them and moving your mouse over any one them gave you more information about them and how they were doing (we've had to shrink this screen shot to less than half width to fit on the page but you get the idea - click on the image to see it full size).

Tracking the Celtman (scaled)

You can also see some of the support vehicles, which also had trackers, marked with green labels.

The day went off without a hitch and in total The Hug served 4,238,649 map tiles to over 10,000 IP addresses as people tracked the event, so well in excess of the Ordnance Survey's daily limits for their OpenSpace server.

Paul Oldham of The Hug was pleased with how the event had gone. He said:

Our WayMaps tiles are built from open data from a variety of sources. We've combined this with a high performance map server which we designed specifically to serve these tiles. The result is a server which is very responsible and affordable, as our participation in this event proved.

If you think WayMaps mapping could help you with your web site then please get in touch.

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