Slashdot Mirror
Equine Speedometers
Makarand writes "According to this article in The New Zealand Herald
scientists at Massey University (NZ) are using
GPS to
monitor racehorses during their training programme. GPS technology is being used to follow horses around a racetrack and measure how far and fast horses gallop each day. This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science."
Now not only do people destroy their family life savings with horse racing.
Now GPS help the horse race business go even higher tech. As if fantasy football and internet slot machine wasn't enough.
Yes because this is obviously something that couldnt be done with sensors on the side of the race track we had to wait till GPS came along. Oh well good job on harnessing technology that will help in my gambling problem
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Next time we are at the racing track will we see m.p.h real-time as the race progresses?
AC
this article has already been posted in the november issue of Terrato local newsletter (the town is particularly known for being fond of horses.)
I am not supposed to tell you this: but given that GPS is not that cheap, the locals are considering switching to some 802.11b application that can track locations via triangulation, so if there are any enterprising slashdotters reading this, let it be known that we would pay quite nicely for a low-overhead solution!
Contact me at mark@pobox.com if you think you qualify.
so will the speed be measured in furlongs per fortnight?
...when they can turn back the odometer on one of them.
...but haven't trainers been doing the exact same thing with stopwatches for decades? I really don't see what benefit GPS could add to the conditioning of race horces beyond the simple but effective technology of yesteryear.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
How is this "off-topic?"
If they can use GPS to estimate the speed of horses, then the same techology can be easily used to estimate the speed of cars.
This especially becomes more interesting as GPS becomes common in cars... it could easily be one more example of how big brother enters our lives.
Gesh.
Davak
And a lot more fun to say.
I've got my car speedometer, plus the tach, plus freaking police radar signs telling me to slow down...I get the message!
The linux hacker
Speeding tickets on horses :(
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
GPS Monitoring and tracking technology, I think, has been used on all species. I might be a bit paranoid, but I think it would be feasible to actually monitor the "whereabouts" of everybody, to know roughly where they are. Given technology, I can tell between such and such time, you were posting to Slash dot, on the web. Monitor on freeway would tell me where you were driving, phone usage, credit cards, etc, etc. With enough money and computer technology, is this something you think is impossible?
I've seen a telemetry system for horses about 15 years ago, that measured speed, heart rate, blood pressure and some other things.
These systems haven't become very widespread because of their cost... and even if we can make them really cheap, I'm not so sure what use it'll have. It's probably interesting to know a horse is running at x km/h, with a heart rate of y and blood pressure z, but what are you going to do with that information?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Maybe because the story is about horses, GPS, and getting more high tech with horse racing. It has nothing to do with Cars, speeding tickets, Ashcroft and Anti-Terror. As far as I can tell, the only thing your comment and the topic have in common is GPS. Don't bitch about mods, if you don't want to be modded of topic then stay on topic. And if it makes you feel better, if I had mod points, I would have modded it flamebait and not off topic.
The greatest mammalian athlete of the last thousand years... the best there ever was, the best there ever will be... to borrow a quote attributed to another once-in-a-lifetime athlete...
Look it up. The horse was preternatural... with a heart more than DOUBLE the size of a typical champion thoroughbred...
When he won the Kentucky Derby in '73, Secretariat ran each successive quarter-mile FASTER than the previous one... this is simply unheard of in horse-racing...
A genetic zenith.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Just go to gpsports.com. The SPI 10 unit can do everything the horse unit can do, plus there is some nifty software so you can make pseudo-3D maps upon returning to your home PC after your workout, as well as altituted and barrometric pressure. Supposedly the unit averages multiple surveying techniques allowing an extremely accurate survey of speed. However, the price is quite steep. Expect to be shelling out at least 1500 bucks, plus more for software upgrades.
I'm unclear as to why they chose GPS. Surely the same result could be achieved used a terrestrial or local area wireless sensor system set up around the track.
The article mentions the problem of speeds differing depending on the start gate, and improved accuracy of GPS is within "a few metres" which is accurate enough. "Good enough" is a long-standing principle in technology deployments but it's not very clear from the article what specific advantage GPS has over other systems beyond the obvious.
This link to the Equine Research New Zealand project at Massey University is slim on details but they may post more info once they get a good Slashdotting.
The system sounds similar to this 2002 Kentucky GPS horse tracking system.
Basically you would do the same thing the edurance athletes have been doing for a while. Since we know that certain heart rates correspond to aerobic or anaerobic exercise, you can make sure that the horse is training aerobically or anaerobically. Also using a heart rate monitor allows you to figure out if the horse is overtraining. With people, overtraining leads to elevations in their resting heart rates and problems in getting your heart rate up while exercising. I'm sure there are analogs in horses that can be used to monitor how hard a workout is for the horse and when the horse needs more time to recover.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
A smally nitpick: As someone who worked in the equine industry before I entered the tech world, I personally believe that horse racing is a science (in a broad sense), and always has been. *smiles*
I believe several posters hit an important point when they stated that they have been able to measure a horse's speed for years using stopwatches. However, they should consider that this technology is only as useful as the person pressing the button, and relies on the user to be able to determine *exactly* when that horse's nose touches the line, and for them to be able to press the stop button fast enough. This tool is extremely handy because, assuming it has great accuracy, it takes the human error problem out. You might not think that parts of a second would matter in horse racing, but it does. Fractions of a second came between breaking Secretariats (famous race horse) track record, and not. It is true that they have bream beams at the major tracks, but overall photo technology is used to determine split seconds, who won, etc., and often this is not available to trainers outside of a race. GPS will simplify that process.
However, my concern is that, having used this technology in a robot that we are working on, the readings are sometimes unreliable as one second it may say you are one place, and the next tell you that you are a foot the other way. That might not seem like a huge distance to you, but combine that with the 30+ mph galloping speed of a well-trained thoroughbred, and you have a problem when it reads the horse as finishing when it really has not. I would be interested in seeing how they address this problem. In horse racing, when gauging against track records, split seconds count!
I believe that a greater application of this technology would be to track those expensive animals in the case that they get stolen. They have been using a variant of RFID to do this for years, but it is limited in distance and thus rarely actually catches animals except at slaughterhouses where they are required to scan for a stolen animal. This might ease an insurance company's mind, and also the owner's, knowing that their animal can be tracked in-transit. Awesome.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
If they're taking an approach based on observation and experimentation, then it was already a science before this. Numbers and measurements do not make a practice a science. If that's all it took, phrenology and numerology would be science.
Like most sports/races, it's been a science for decades. it's called doping. I guarantee the money that is spent on doping research(and both the technology to test for said drugs as well as the technology to skirt testing) will always pale in comparison to the money spent on GPS units, laptops, and database programs.
Doping is almost at crisis levels in the world of sports; it's rampant. What's pathetic is when you tell a league you're going to test them months in advance, test them, and find a large # of them still using the drug, because they were too stupid to stop(this would be baseball we're talking about here.) Imagine the results if it had been a surprise test; the implied #'s are staggering. How many were using and were smart enough to stop? Most of them. So when you catch even a 20th...
What if we did drug testing in the golf league? Figure skating? Downhill skiing? They've tried to do it in cycling, but found such a scandal, the sport would be over if they locked everyone up who was using(in a raid in Italy, cops found an entire team doping up. It was like a high school houseparty raid, complete with people hiding in closets and jumping out windows). Once has to wonder if Lance Armstrong's results aren't the result of miracles, but all the cancer drugs glaxo-cline pumped into him.
It's also a national embarrassment when a large number of US olympians were found to be using drugs as well. While I despise those who advocate legalizing pot, it's shocking that the US snowboarding team would get sent home for lighting up, yet a dozen US track+field athletes are found to be using performance drugs and they don't even get their medals stripped.
Lesson here for young kids? 1)use drugs and you'll beat people who don't; you'll be successful, rich, famous. 2)You probably won't get caught since drug makers are usually ahead of the testing technology. 3)If you do get caught, you've still gotten millions(or hundreds of millions) and 4)If you've got a good enough lawyer, you'll probably get to keep your medals anyway, and you'll be knocked down the endorsement ladder pretty far, but still make in a week what most people make in a year.
Please help metamoderate.
and you can "WarHorse" all of the wireless AP's at the racetrack.
If they can use GPS to estimate the speed of horses, then the same techology can be easily used to estimate the speed of cars. Current GPS software in cars are able to monitor the velocity and direction of movement of a vehicle. However, most software that comes with GPS modules for consumer cars do not have this software available for consumer use.
Isn't GPS too imprecise over those sort of scales? Racehorses win races by lots less than "fifteen meters, plus or minus".
If you "really" think about it, everything is stupid and pointless. What is the point in anything you do? Why play games, or watch TV? Just something to do to waste time. I suppose posting and commenting is pointless and wastes time, but what the heck, I have nothing else to do, besides, I like commenting. :D
This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science.
Yes, because as everybody knows, anything that involves measuring something instantly becomes 'science.'
Goodness, that comment is going to get all the statistics freaks upset.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Don't forget to add the roll-bar cam!
Jory
Hello, people -- the freaking lead paragraph says "during the training programme"; why is half the discussion here about whether GPS is accurate enough to judge races? (It's _NOT_; go look up the specs.) Not reading the articles is bad enough, but how can anyone justify this severe a lack of retention in the 2 minutes it takes to create a comment?
It will take a lot more than my five mod points to trim the crap out of THIS thread; I'm not even going to try.
sigh....
We've got hobbits AND cyborg horses. Take THAT, Coalition of the Willing!
I thought GPS even without the US military's intervention had a margin for error. True it might be measured in centimeters but when the performance of a horse is measured in microseconds (think photofinish at the track) those tiny errors become a relatively large factor.
I just don't see that this is feasible to the degree of accuracy trainers and most owners will require.
Timex is selling a device called the Bodylink that does all this: GPS + Data Recorder + Heart Rate Monitor.
Since it is such a famous horse, I assume the owners kept some of it's genetic material on ice. As such, why hasn't it been cloned yet?
we-don't-know-what-the-fud-we're-talking-about dept.
horse training has been a 'science' since before there was electricity.
This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science.
In other news, GPS technology is also transforming aeronautics and navigation into a science, at long last...
Oh, wait, it already was. And so was racehorse training. Just ask any of the veterinarians who've worked in that field for 30 years or so (like my father).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
This is what to expect with an autonomous GPS unit like the cheap $200 hand-held units you can get from Garmin or Magellan.
There are surveyor grade differential GPS units that have sub-centimeter accuracy.
The way these work is you first need to survey a position, in this case how about the center of the infield, to find its exact coordinates. You then set up a base station GPS unit exactly on top of this surveyed point. You enter the coordinates into the base station unit. Every second the base station gets a reading from the satellites and compares the solution it calculates with where it knows it actually is. The base station then broadcasts this difference to the roving GPS unit. The rover takes the solution it has derived and applies the difference it receives from the base station, and voila, an extremely accurate fix of your position.
Assuming the track invested in having a monument surveyed in the outfield and maintains the base station, a rover unit would not be that expensive for individual horse owners to purchase.
But in the article, they mentioned that their GPS units were only accurate to a few meters. Yes, your mentioned technology would certainly be best, but, unless I read the article incorrectly (egads! I RTFA), they are not using very reliable units.
Perhaps they should look into using units similar to your own. I am familiar with differential GPS and have used it, not finding it accurate enough for our liking, but I have never tried the surveyor grade ones, nor am I familiar with them. The units that we use on our robot are not the cheap handheld ones. A company was generous enough to donate a somewhat decent one to us, although the accuracy is not as good as the top-of-the-line ones, unfortunately.
The problem with setting up a base station at the track is it makes the units less portable and less convenient. For that the work, each track in the world would have to do the same, and the likeliness of the happening is almost nothing. The current GPS setup they have can be used at any track in the world, be it Churchill Downs, a track in New Zealand (their turf horses come over here to race all of the time!), or Belmont Park. They could use it at their training stables as well.
Having an accurate account could certainly help when, after a big race, the race has to be reviewed because a jockey calls foul of a horse bumping out of the gate, or pinning against the pole. In a crowded field where cameras have limited vision, this information could be very helpful. But I still stand by the fact that, requiring each racetrack to maintain a base station is a little too hopeful a goal. There are hundreds of tracks, and having a technology that can be used anywhere at any time would be much more useful.
Interesting idea, though.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Galileo Leaflet
Unfortunately I think tunnel vision (just like a horse !) defence issues will prevail over the potential money to be made from extremely accurate geolocation technology. And boy there is a lot of money to be made here - 200 Billion according to EU estimates.
And before I get modeed as a Troll - Terrorists don't need accurate telemetry. When a bomb goes off at 30,000 feet who give a sh*t where its located - it probably used some crappy pressure sensor. The suicide car/truck bomber doesn't check their GPS to verify the exact position and the twin towers were fairly f*cking obvious targets using domestic technology. Accurate GPS actually STOPS collateral damage by providing accurate geolocation for ordanance. The more accurate a missile is the less chance of collateral damage. If a foreign power e.g. North Korea decided to launch missiles at a US base then if you were living near a military base would you prefer an ACCURATE missile or something thats got a good chance of hitting you ! Of course defence advisers will say ACCURATE GPS is a BAD thing without qualifying - its BAD for the military NOT The taxpayer.
I believe that a greater application of this technology would be to track those expensive animals in the case that they get stolen. They have been using a variant of RFID to do this for years, but it is limited in distance and thus rarely actually catches animals except at slaughterhouses where they are required to scan for a stolen animal.
Did you RTFA? Are we supposed to be expecting a Darwinesqe award from someone who stole a million dollar horse and forgot to leave the GPS unit behind?
Hint: Read the caption, It's in the saddle blanket, the size of a small brick.
I'm still waiting for a way to measure an equine's horsepower...
What? Oh...
Learn something new.
DGPS (differential gps) units run around $5,000 each. One is needed for a base staion, the other would go on the horse. The ones that I've seen weren't too small either.
The question is how does this effect the privacy of the horses? I mean, sometimes after a long race, a horse needs some privacy to... well.. we all know where this is going =:-)
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I don't even want to know where you put the speedometer cable.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
My intention, and I appologize if this was unclear, was for them to develop smaller units similar to the implantable RFID ones. I have seen some very, very tiny GPS units (at the 2003 Boston Embedded Systems Conference they had units that were almost the size of quarters), so I was trying to suggest that they should develop smaller, implantable units, or at least units small enough to be tucked inside its traveling halter. I suppose that I left that for guessing, but in saying a "greater application" and mentioning RFID this is what I was inferring, but this was admittedly not clear. I appologize.
And yes, I did RTFA.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Isn't GPS a huge overkill for this kind of project? I mean... you don't need a frekin sattelite to track horse around a 1/2 mile track.
Plus I thought commercially available GPS was only accurate to aabout + or - 3 meters (or 3 feet ~= 1 meter? something like that...).
And how much of an advantage would that be to knowing the track length and counting the number of laps? Oh well... I guess people are lazy.
WHO CARES ???? Is this the best we can do on /. ?
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
Throughbreds have to be live covered, aka this would be against the rules.
They solved the problem of human intervention years ago in motor racing. They have some sort of optical or radio based sensor on the car so they can measure lap times to the nearest 1000th of a second apparently.
Why not just use that technology which is available off the shelf?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Shoot, I've been using a GPS for a speedometer in my car for close to a year now. I've found it accurate, easy to use, and cheaper than actually fixing the problem :-)
(and yes i'm afraid i'm serious about that last part)
like with gliders... so data can be logged and analysed. It has the size of a pack of sigarettes (needs 12V/100mA though). The loggers have digital signatures and they can't be tampered with (ok, you could feed an HF gps signal in there but that is stretching it).
nosig today
The real worry here is that they'll start tracking how fast I ride my rental horse, and charge me extra for going too fast.
I appologize if I am not clear. I will give explaining this my best shot, but I am having trouble putting it into words. But I will give it a shot, anyways.
Two words: size, convenience
Now, an explanation:
I am fairly certain that the boxes put in NASCAR cars are large and heavy, insofar as I can remember. I suppose that, when dealing with cars, size was not a concern. A device inside the car doesn't really reduce aerodynamics or increase the relative weight that much. The same is not true for placing a large GPS unit outside of a car, which is effectively what you are doing when you have to strap it on the horse if the device doesn't fit under a saddle pad which is usually very small and thin. An average jockey saddle is nothing more than a tiny piece of leather a little larger than the size of...hmm...about the size of the average mouse pad. Also, in most NASCAR races, the cars finish with a much greater margin between them. Now, last season I watched some fairly close races, but usually photofinish will suffice. Track records in NASCAR are usually shattered by seconds (and given the speed of the cars, this is a HUGE margin) while track records for horses are usually determined by fractions of a second. The preciseness of the NASCAR units, therefore, are probably less a concern than they would be in a horse race.
Also, the difference lies in here, the GPS is used as a training tool. In NASCAR, it is a racing tool. There is a huge difference between the significance of a horse's training speed and that of a car. The idea here is to allow the trainer to be able to monitor the horse's performance without needing additional track technology, to make his training more convenient and independent, while reliable. In a NASCAR race, alot of the race success is based on how well the car can draft off of its teammate (since remember that NASCAR is largely a team sport, whereas horse racing is not.) The speed of a single car, while important, does not take into consideration the benefit of drafting behind another car in the race. In horse racing, following closely behind another horse is not seen as an advantage because the dirt thrown up from the track tends to irritate a horse, and horses who are trapped behind another horse tend to wear themselves out of being able to win. Horses tend to race better alone or in pairs, when they do not get caught in behind other horses, unlike NASCAR where wide-open in-the-front racing is often disadvantageous and terrible for gas mileage. Of course, knowing the state-of-health of both car and horse is equally important to training success, so in that respect the two units are equally important. But, information retrieved from a single horse training on its own track alone is more significant than that of a car racing on its own, IMHO, making the ability of a trainer to track how well his horse is individually training on any course in the world is advantageous--and better, to do so with a device that weighs almost nothing (a pound of added weight is HUGE in handicapping horses) would be very useful. So, the idea here is to create a way for the trainers to independently track their animals on any track in the world. While doing so in NASCAR would be nice, most NASCAR racers have the benefit of in-place technology at the tracks. NASCAR racers also use the technology less often as proof-of-concept is usually tested on race day, whereas horses are flesh and blood that require daily training to maintain condition, and they travel the world (unlike NASCAR racers), so having this be available the world over at any time of night is the focus. In short, the two technologies are applied and developed differently.
There is also the problem that NASCAR vehicles have speedometers and automatic logging equipment built into the vehicle itself. A fleshandblood horse does not have this advantage. Trying to stick one of those huge black boxes they put in NASCARS onto a racehorse would not be pretty. That is why there is a need to design a horse-friendly GPS/monitoring unit.
In short, I do not think that you can use NASCAR units on horses without redesign.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
There is nothing about the hardware that should be expensive except that the current market is incredibly small, so all research costs must be spread over a very small user population.
The Corp of Engineers have fixed DGPS base stations in certain areas that can be used for free. For example there is complete DGPS coverage along the entire Mississippi river for barges to use. If one of these was within broadcast range of a racetrack, there would be no need for the track to have their own.
The cheap handheld units already use a version of DGPS called WAAS. There are two satellites in space broadcasting correction signals. This isn't as good as a base station that is 1/4 away, but you see where the technology is heading.
If every idea was evaluated on the state, cost, and size of current technology, nothing would ever happen.
it's disturbing that nobody has acknowledged that this entire article was an excuse to the word "equine"
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
"This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science"
Ehhh... Stop-watches, anyone?
Well, for one thing, both your post and the parent post combine for the #1 and #2 clueless postings (I'll leave it to you to figure out the order)
What does using GPS in place of a speedometer have to do with more speeding ticksts. A GPS used in this regard is no different than the speedometer in your car.
Perhaps you idiots don't realize that GPS satellites are one-way only. A GPS receiver in your car cannot send a signal to any of the GPS satellites.
So, if you were to use GPS with speed control you would still need to send the signal with some other radio device. But you could do the exact same thing with a standard tranny driven speedometer, so what does the use of GPS have to do with anything?
They're transforming it into a statistical exercise.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I see a lot of people saying "oh why can't you use 802.11 instead?" Well, horse trainers have to exercise their animals at a large variety of tracks sometimes. GPS's advantage is that you can take it with you, it's extremely portable.
I seriously doubt this will catch on in anywide spread way. Its simply another way of thelling how quickly the horse is traveling, but this doesnt help in the conditioning of the horse any more than a stop watch. I'm involved with horses(in a non-techy way), and believe me, the people who work in the industry are old school, and tech illiterate. They wouldnt even know what to do with this.
Oh my, I think Dave just turned into a bear.
At my family's bicycle store, we have a shop dog named Macy, who is a labrador mix. Macy is getting old now but back in his prime, he loved to pull people around on a skateboard. Some of the braver employees would put a harness on the dog and take a longboard out behind the shop and let him run. It was unreal how fast this dog could run. One of the guys came up with an idea for clocking Macy's top speed: the GPS. Using a Garmin eMap, we clocked them at 28mph. At this speed, the board began to get unstable so the rider bailed but he's pretty sure that Macy had a few more mph in him.
</OFFTOPIC>
perhaps...but would you like to be the trainer who has to manually enter the data into the computer?
Some data gathered by GPS simply can't be captured by hand to manualy enter. NMEA output from GPS receivers give speed, direction, position, and other data once a second. Acceleration is easly calculated. Try that with a pencil and a stopwatch.
The truth shall set you free!
This especially becomes more interesting as GPS becomes common in cars... it could easily be one more example of how big brother enters our lives.
Big brother is a factor if you take the information from your GPS receiver and re-transmit it to someone else. On-Star is noted for this using a cell phone connection. The Toyota Prius GPS is not noted for this as the GPS receiver feeds the on-board map unit and is not sent off to 3rd parties. The same thing is true for my hand held GPS I use hiking. I would have to tell someone my location via cell or radio. The unit does not broadcast that info.
The speed function is great. I can tell my speed even when factors such as oversize tires make the mechanical speedomoter wrong. The owners manual specs the speed accuracy at about 0.1 MPH. It's much more accurate than the speedometer built into the dash.
The truth shall set you free!
HKJC is already using a commercial HorseTrack System.
"Each jockey will have a small transponder tag placed in their helmet. As they pass one of the 31 strategically placed radio frequency receivers on the racetrack, their location will be calculated to within 10 centimeters."
Mod down please
The Roving GPS can still be used as a normal GPS unit, no?
Precise measurements are more important when running in circles (close proximity, lots of direction change.) However, in larger patterns (field riding,) the GPS unit would have more space to average over.
Besides, precise, accurate measurements are more important during a race than when training.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
I flew GPS satellites for the AF for about 8 years, and taught it as a AETC instructor for about 3 of those 8. So you can consider me a Subject Matter Expert :-)
Anyway, DGPS and GLONASS (the Soviet Union's equiv to GPS) lead to the DoD turning off Selective Availability (SA), which degraded GPS to about a hundred meters. There are two signals sent down (L1 and L2) with Precision code and C/A (Coarse Acquisition) code. High quality, military units can lock right onto P-code, but most units lock onto C/A code and then they get P code. This is why older sources will quote 100 meter accuracy, but modern GPS sets will claim around 10 meters.
I mostly wrote this to add to some other questions, such as why don't we use other forms? Because accuracy of your positioning is very dependant upon timing. As a GPS satellite operator, I spent 80% of my time maintaining the atomic clocks on the 24 satellites. Newer generation GPS satellites will self-adjust each other, but I digress. An atomic clock on a GPS satellite is accurate to a nanosecond, and is monitored 24/7. The resources to recreate this locally would be very cost prohibitive. Yes, GPS can have drift due to atmospheric variances, but DGPS, and WAAS can compensate for this. Your signal is delayed due to the Earth's atmosphere, but you are still getting a timing signal that is close to a nanosecond of accuracy. I can't see how a 802.11b system can provide triangularization with even remotely close accuracy.
As a function of speed, the accuracy of a GPS set can degrade as a horse runs faster. However, technology can make it still very accurate. I'm not familiar with the units the horses will be using, but I would expect it to be within a foot or two. I'm not sure I would use it to establish a race winner, however, without some sort of supporting technology (photo, radar, GPS-augmentation such as WAAS, DGPS, etc). Regardless, it would still be incredibly accurate for training purposes.
On a side note, one of my friends' father owned/raised race-horses back in the 80s. Horse racing has been VERY scientific for quite some time now. Biology, geneology, toxicology, etc, are all brought in to maximize their performance
HTH,
John
I missed the opportunity for so many wonderful mare trolls :(
Come on, black horses are cute too!
Nah, it was a bow towards the mare trolls.