[dhitchco]

Hey Dave,
good dialog. I work for Harris Corporation's RF Communications Division in Rochester NY.

Most of us in the RF world talk about "time of flight" as a way in which to determine bearing and distance to a target. basically, send out a pulse (like a bat), wait for the return signal, and determine the "time of flight" to get distance. Hopefully, you use all kinds of tricks to ensure that you're receiving the actual signal from the player, not a reflection (multipath signal) off of something else. Each player on the court would have his/her own frequency ID, so that's not a problem, and all players would 'beacon' every 500ms or so to the same set of three or four courtside receivers. A PC would do the time-of-flight calculations for each player's signal and do the vector triangulation.

ps: I don't know why professional sports haven;t gone to such a system to "track" a play (e.g. football playbook instead of John Madden's chalkboard)


TIES TO FIRST ROBOTICS:
As an aside, I've often wondered if the autonomous period for robots could be improved by 'triangulating' the robot position off of TWO (2) light sources...but, we have enough trouble focusing-in on one source as it is..... Maybe I can scrounge-up a garage business of some cheap RF beacons for bots in the future!