This Is Now
The success of the 802.11b equipment led to another innovation at this year's Open: The Unisys wireless Golf Scoring System went paperless. Instead of the walking scorers passing paper records to greenside scorers with wireless devices, 52 walking scorers, one per group of golfers on the course, each carried an Intermec 710 Series Mobile Computer. The greenside scorers are history.
The Scorer's App uses the touch screen on the Pocket PC to collect information on each hole for each golfer in a foursome. The scorer records "yes" or "no" for a fairway hit, the number of strokes to a green or greenside bunker, the number of shots made from a greenside bunker, the number of putts and the total score. When the total is recorded, the handheld app checks to make sure the total and the strokes recorded in each category are the same. If everything jibes, the scorer pushes a button to batch-upload all that hole's data to the scoring server. The scoring server takes that information and calculates some key statistics, such as fairways and greens hit in regulation and sand saves. The server then blasts that information to hardwired terminals scattered around the tournament site.
At each of the 20 leaderboards, which are still like the old ballpark scoreboards that require manual operators to post physical signs, the operators use another handheld application, the Leaderboard App, to keep the 18 leaderboards around the course up to date. Rather than using push technology to force an update down to the leaderboard device, Unisys has found it works better to notify the operators that an update is available. It's up to the operator to pull down an update to his or her device, which helps avoid confusion while operators might be busy handling previous updates.
This Network Has Wires, Too
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