Before moving to sailwave, we used some ither software that also did progressive handicapping, but with a couple of differences.
That software gave you the option of whether to update handicaps after a race or not. For example we may not update the while fleet if conditions had been too ineqitable over the race, or we could change an individual boats handicap, for example, a boat that had gear breakage might not get updated,
Or a boat new to the fleet could be changed if we didnt get an inital handicap correct.
It doesnt seem like its possible to do either of the above in sailwave using nhc?
Also, out previous calculations used aailed to tines over the previous 3 races, as well as cappung the shift up or down. This had the effect of moderating any shift of the handicap as a result of 1 races performance.
I think you can customise the calculation? outside my level of expertise, has anyone done this that could help?
Ok so investigating the customisation options, can someone explain (in small words ) what difference adjusting the parameters in the spreadsheet make in real life?
Sailwave actually lets you customise the whole personal handicap system so you could make it do exactly the same as your other system including the averaging over multiple races. (one of the earlier versions of NHC did do this) if you so wish.
To fully customise the personal handicap system you supply a different template and tell Sailwave to use this template. So what happens in practice here is Sailwave automatically starts Excel and loads this template, it then populates the template as defined by the config sheet of the template and then the results of the template are taken back into Sailwave without the user having to have any knowledge of Excel. So only the designer of the template needs to understand Excel and how the calculations are performed
There are a couple of templates included with Sailwave including the ECHO system, as used in Ireland, and the alternative NHC SWNHC2015.
The standard NHC is built into Sailwave and doesn’t need Excel.
From your last post a quick explanation
NHC uses a standard deviation to decide which competitors are outliers (or Extreme) these are competitors that have performed exceptionally well or exceptionally poorly.
The Standard Deviation Over and Under determines how well or how poorly they perform to be classified as extreme. These competitors are adjusted by a different amount than the regular competitors.
You have 4 adjustments that can be made
Adjustment for regular competitors that have over performed
Adjustment for regular competitors that have under performed
Adjustment for extreme competitors that have over performed
Adjustment for extreme competitors that have under performed
If it is only these that you wish to adjust you can do that using a .ini file and the built in NHC - There was a recent post on this forum about this as well as some older ones
Please explain the Std Dev of 1.0, Is that only going to adjust the 1 boat above and below by 30% +/- ??
And what is the minimum finishers of 3 mean?
How does ECHO differ from NHC?
I plan on using one of these for next years summer evening series of 22 races. I really need to find something that is easy for volunteers to use other than tracking ratings with a spread sheet and manually adjusting them in SW. We use PHRF and I have taken our results from this years races and switched the scoring to NCH and it seems stable.
We had 5 boats in A (115 and lower) 5 boats in B (116 and higher) and a cruising class (non Spin).
Sometimes we only had 2 boats in each class out there.
As per the NYC specification, Sailwave calculates a Standard deviation of results. I’m not going to try and explain Standard deviation here there are lots of explanations on the web, far better than I could do it but here is the Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation .
But in answer to your question. No it does not mean 1 boat it will all depend upon how close or spread out the results are.
ECHO was one of the early progressive handicaps mostly used by the Irish Sailing.
The RYA wished to develop something similar but a bit more sophisticated. They based their NHC on the ECHO concept but added to it so that boats that suddenly did poorly in a race (usually because of some external factor e.g. running aground) wouldn’t have such an effect on their handicap for the next race. Or may be someone was “lucky” with a wind shift that gave them a big advantage (Maybe it was skill) but if they did particularly well in a race the NHC won’t penalise them as much as would happen with ECHO.
The built in NHC is slightly easier and quicker than using ECHO although I hope to build ECHO into Sailwave over the winter.
The Minimum finishers is by default set to 3 but this can be change. This means that if only 1 or 2 boats finish the ratings will not change. The current rating will be carried over to the next race. This is because with only 2 finishers there is not enough information to fairly change the ratings. You can set it to 2 if you wish but I wouldn’t recommend it
) what difference adjusting the parameters in the spreadsheet make in real life?
