No special gear. Your devices just need a normal mobile connection, the same one they use to send a text. There is no track Wi-Fi to arrange, no hub to power, and no hardware to set up.
Coverage is not always good, and that is expected
Fields and tracks are not known for perfect signal. FinishLine is built to ride out the hiccup rather than assume it away.
Every device holds its own captures. When a finish timer records a time, that time is written to durable storage on that device before anything is sent over the network. If the connection drops, the capture is already safe. When the connection returns, the device catches up on its own.
This is the single most important property to understand about running a meet on a weak signal: a brief outage costs you live updates, not results.
What an outage actually looks like: the results device stops seeing new times appear, and the affected device shows its connection state in the toolbar. Times continue to be captured the whole time. They arrive in a burst when the signal returns.
What degrades, and in what order
| Connection state | What still works | What waits |
|---|---|---|
| Good signal | Everything | — |
| Weak or intermittent | Capture, staging, local review | Live results, cross-device updates |
| Fully offline mid-heat | Capture on each device | Everything else, until it returns |
| Offline before the meet opens | Standalone timer only | Joining a connected session |
The one thing that genuinely needs connectivity is joining a session. A device has to reach the service once to be admitted to the meet. After that it is resilient.
Timing accuracy on a poor signal
Devices keep their clocks aligned by polling a shared time source, so it is fair to ask what happens to accuracy when that polling gets sparse.
Each device carries a model of its own clock drift, so it stays accurate through short gaps rather than losing alignment the moment a poll is missed. If a device genuinely cannot keep its clock within tolerance, it flags the affected results rather than quietly recording a time it cannot vouch for. The full picture is in how the clock sync works.
Practical advice
- Check signal at the finish line, not the parking lot. That is where the devices that matter will sit.
- Devices on different carriers is a feature, not a problem. They do not talk to each other directly, so one carrier having a bad day at that field does not take the crew down.
- A phone hotspot is a fine backstop for a device that has no service of its own, though it will drain the host phone over a long meet.
- Fully offline? The standalone stopwatch works with no account and no connection at all. You lose coordination and live results, not the ability to time.
Did this answer your question? If something here is wrong, missing, or out of date, tell us at support@finishlinetimer.com and we’ll fix it.