[kamocat]

My main complaint is the lack of troubleshooting and reliability between the FMS and the robot radios, and the accountability that goes along with that.

If your robot doesn't connect after a certain amount of time, they just start the match anyways. Yes, that keeps the matches on time, but is that fair?
How do you tell what the problem is?
I don't mean just replace parts until it works. I mean how do you determine WHAT is going wrong?
Is it the FMS radio? Is it the robot radio? Is it the position on the field? Is it interference from illegal radios in the pit? Is there some aluminum around acting as a faraday cage and absorbing the signal? Is the signal getting blocked by one of the bumps on the field? Is the impact from coming down off the bump affecting it?
We don't know.
We don't have any way of testing.
Teams are told that their radio is broke, and if they want the FMS team to work with them, all they can do is replace it.
But it connected successfully before. What could have happened to break a robot radio? Do they wear out after a few hours of use?

We don't know.

We need a way of testing this, and testing the fields. Is the only way of testing it to try it on the actual field?
How about some quantitative data? What's your % packet loss? How long are the packets taking to get there? What's the signal strength?
What's the amplitude of 5MHz or 2.4MHz radio as you travel around the field? Are there nodes of strong and weak signal?

What can we do to create a test for these things and make it available at regionals? Very few teams have access to a computer engineer with the experience with 802.11n to make a test for this.