Frequently Asked Questions

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On a busy track, there is a possibility that another athlete will be detected by your Gate’s motion sensor during a Trial. SplitFast has a Proximity filter that can help prevent this from happening.
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The Gate Proximity Setting uses the Bluetooth signal between your iPhone and the Gate to determine how close you are to the Gate. When the Gate senses motion it will send a message to your SplitFast iPhone App. If your iPhone is further away than your Proximity setting, it will ignore the motion event message from the Gate. Once it is within range the proximity filter will allow a motion event to be registered.

The settings are in meters of distance from the Gate, but due to different outdoor environments, these settings are approximate. You should experiment with different settings to find a distance that reliably measures a motion event when you are close to the Gate.

The recommended way to do this is to Set the Gate to Split or Finish mode and set your SplitFast App to Race training Mode. Place your iPhone a distance away from the Gate that you would like to use as the detection boundary. Then start a Trial and walk through the Gate. Do this with different Proximity Settings until you can walk through the gate undetected (the trial will not record your gate event). Then place your phone close to the Gate and run another trial to make sure the iPhone does detect the gate event.

On tracks where there are multiple athletes using SplitFast Apps with their own Gates, it’s possible to hide the other Gates, so you will only detect and receive motion events from your own Gates. SplitFast has a Bluetooth Group ID setting that you can use to create a private SplitFast network that will hide Gates being used by other athletes.

To create a Private group, connect with each Gate and set the Gate Bluetooth Group ID to a value between 1 and 250. Once all the Gates are set to the same ID, change the iPhone Trial Settings to the same Bluetooth Group ID as the Gates. Your iPhone will no longer detect any Gates that are not set to your private group.

Note that if the Bluetooth Group ID on your iPhone is set to 0 in the Trial Setup page on the SplitFast App you will detect all Gates in range regardless of their Group ID setting.

This SplitFast App is freely available to download from the App Store, so anyone with the App can potentially find and connect to your Gates. To keep your gates secure, you can set your own 6 digit PIN code. When an iPhone attempts to connect with a gate, the Gate requests a PIN code. If the PIN provided by the iPhone is not correct, the Gate will not allow the iPhone to connect. Note that the first time you connect successfully, the PIN code will be saved and used automatically by your iPhone App in the future.

Flying Start mode uses a start gate, a finish gate and optional split gates. This training mode can measure your top speed and acceleration between gates. Since you are already moving at a certain speed when you break the start gate, you need to set the distance of the start gate, so you know how far you travelled before reaching it, and the distances covered for the complete trial. In Flying start, your results will show the Start event with a time of 0.00 seconds and the distance that the Start gate is set on the track. Next you will see any Split Gates and finally the Finish gate.

In Race mode, you can select the start method you would like to use. Either Starting Gun or Motion Start. In Starting Gun mode, SplitFast will measure the time delay between when the Gun fires, and when you leave the blocks, this is your reaction time. In Motion Start mode, you decide when you want to begin running, so the system begins timing as soon as you leave the blocks. Both methods can give you different information about your performance. Starting Gun is good to simulate actual race conditions, and Motion Start provides consistent repeatable conditions to compare your performance over multiple trials.

When you view your results in the Results Page in the App or in an exported results file, the values shown will depend on the type of trial and starting mode used.

Each Trial will have a heading row that shows the Date and Time the trial was run, the Trial ID number (for example T23) and the Training mode of the Trial: Race, Lap, Flying-Start or Shuttle.

Tap the “>” symbol on the left of each row to see all result components for the Trial. You will then see the method used to start the trial and then any result times. For example in Race mode, you will see either Motion Start or Starting Gun. In starting gun mode you will see a reaction time then any split times and a finish time. Motion start has no reaction time, but will have a Finish time and split times if you were using additional split gates.

You can select any of your Trial results and send them to a coach or training partner, and also export then to an external application like Excel.

In the Results page of the App, tap the check mark on the right side of the results you would like to Export. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the page and enter one or more email addresses that you would like to receive your results file. The App will send the results as a .CSV format file which can be opened in a spreadsheet program like Excel.

Once the results file is opened in Excel, you can view and perform calculations on the results. Note that the Result column is in a time stamp format of HH:MM:SS.00 which will give you a detailed time result of Hours:Minutes:Seconds.Hundredths.
By default, Excel will round the seconds value to whole seconds and tenths of seconds. To display hundredths of seconds, do the following:

1.    Open the .CSV file in Excel
2.    Highlight the values in the Result column
3.    Right click one of the highlighted cells and select Format Cells
4.    Select “Number” and “Custom” and enter the format Type: hh:mm:ss.00

You will now see the full resolution of your results. If your results are less than 1 hour or even less than 1 minute, you can hide these values by changing the Type format string to either: mm:ss.00 to hide the hours or ss.00 to show only seconds and hundredths. Note that even though some time fields can be hidden, their values will still be used in any calculations.