On Fri, 08 Jul 2005 16:05:05 GMT, H M Leary <
[email protected]>
wrote:
>I have noticed that all the bikes in the TDF have a yellow device on the
>left chainstay.
>
>It appears to be too far back to be a cadence sensor.
>
>Freddy Poseurs want to know!
This comes up every year.
It's a tracking device used to ensure that none of the riders tries to
take a shortcut. If the bike leaves the course for more than about a
minute, the piece explodes, throwing purple dye around. It's
deactivated at the end of each stage by a special transmitter at the
finish point, and reactivated at the starting point the next day.
Previously, these reacted to a signal carried by a wire buried in the
road, but now they use a GPS matchup with the internally stored data
about the location of the route; the data is uploaded when the device
is activated at the starting point.
I thought everyone knew this by now. That's why Lance was in such a
godawful hurry to get down and back on the course after the infamous
spill last year.
(If you believe any of the above except the first line, I have a deal
on some coastal real estate in South Dakota that we need to discuss.)
--
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