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UNISYS Wireless Golf Scoring System: Page 4 of 5

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15 Minutes

Jeff Schroeder: Technical Manager for Global Sports Marketing, Unisys

Jeff Schroeder, 44, runs the scoring operations for all the golf tournaments run by the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) of America. In addition to ensuring that the scoring system is up and running at each tournament, Schroeder writes and maintains the applications used on the handheld Intermec Pocket PCs for scoring and at the leaderboard. He also wrote the browser-based apps used to deliver scoring data and statistics to on-site officials, media and the real-time leaderboards available worldwide over the Internet.

Biggest technical snafu: In 1999, our UHF antenna cable fell apart during the event and we were off the air until we could climb the tower and make a repair.

When simple is better: We have our own programmer--me--so we take advantage of that to make sure each app is tuned to operate efficiently over low-bandwidth connections. I exchange eight packets with each access point to monitor connectivity and collect the management information I need to ensure that everything is working correctly. An SNMP management package would blast a huge amount of traffic over our connections and collect a ton of information we don't need.