Upgrade to RC4 Decoder and impact on PTs

[RobW]

As promised following the club committee meeting last night I want to present club members with the facts around our current lap counting system, the changes we are planning and finally how this will affect club members.

The club currently runs on a 10 year old RC2 decoder with RC3 software. This allows the use of the original AMB 3 tab transponders, the newer Harry AMB transponders and MRT transponders. It currently works but is no longer under any support and should it go wrong our only option is to upgrade straight to a RC4 at an unknown upgrade price. Currently BBK are showing a predicted upgrade of £1400 after 1 April and a brand new RC4 without any trade in costs £2400. Without a definite date of upgrade BBK would be unable to guarantee any trade in deals in the future. This is a critical difference to many other clubs who are running RC3 decoders, many of whom can benefit from a free software upgrade to RC4 when and if they decide to make the move.

We are currently being offered an upgrade to a RC4 decoder with a warranty for £415 as part of the Mylaps (the manufacturers of the decoders) drive to get clubs to upgrade together with significant discounts on traded in transponders. This offer is valid until around the end of March.

The committee has thought and discussed long and hard about this decision and what is best for the club and its membership in the long term. In the end there was unanimous agreement that the only responsible action to take is to upgrade to a RC4 decoder now. Our decoder will therefore be up graded to RC4 with effect from the club meeting on 24th March in order to give us a little breathing space to iron out any issues before the first regional event. The benefits we see are:

• Reduced risk to the club. Not upgrading now at the discounted price could put the long term survival of the club in jeopardy if the decoder fails sometime in the future. If funds were not available to purchase the upgrade at upto £2400 then the club would close until it could raise funds which would be difficult with no race meetings.

• If we upgrade now club members with MRT transponders can take advantage of the PT upgrade scheme which significantly reduces the cost of moving to a AMB transponder. If we wait until we have to upgrade due to failure then MRT users will need to buy new transponders at the prevailing standard cost of £60-70.

• In the longer term the only transponders available will be Purcys which only work on the RC4 system. We want to allow new members to the club the choice of purchasing these and using them at the club as they are cheaper than Harrys.

• At the point Harry transponders are no longer available, all warranty claims for faulty AMB transponders will be dealt with by Purcy replacements. These will only work with a RC4 decoder.

We do however understand the disadvantage that this upgrade will cause and that is that all those with MRT transponders will no longer be able to use them and will have to upgrade to an AMB transponder. In order to reduce the impact on owners of MRT transponders we have agreed the following offer to club members:

• Each club member (you must be a paid up club member) will be able to trade in one MRT transponder for a Harry AMB transonder for £20. This is a further discount of £18 against the current BBK trade in scheme for 10+ units.

• The club will also provide a trade in service for any further MRT transponders you wish to trade in at the 10+ unit price of £38 instead of the £42 you would pay if you went direct to BBK yourself.
  

The reasoning behind discounting the first upgrade more heavily rather than allowing people to upgrade several MRT transponders at a smaller discount is we want to minimise the amount any driver has to spend in order to continue to race at TORCH. No TORCH club member will have to spend more than £20 as a result of this upgrade.

The position with AMB transponders is quite different. No one needs to upgrade an AMB transponder as a result of this upgrade. The committee does not therefore see it as appropriate to spend club funds on subsidising upgrades that are purely a matter of choice for club members to upgrade to a later version or, for example in my case, replace an old and tired one. We will however, as a service to members, facilitate a trade-in service in order for you to trade in old/broken/tired AMB transponders at the 10+ unit price of £38. The MRT trade-ins will have to take priority and we will only begin to trade in AMBs once we have dealt with all the MRT trade-ins.

We are currently intending only providing a service to upgrade to Harry transponders as all the indications so far are that we would not get enough people (10) wanting to upgrade to a Purcy to get a group discount. Given that Harrys will work with any decoder and Purcys only with the RC4 decoder I think most people are currently thinking that the Harry is currently the better choice in case you ever decide to race at another club in the future. If you do decide you want to upgrade to a Purcy, let us know and we keep a note in case we get 10 requests but looking unlikely at the moment.

The process for swapping over transponders will be for the club to order them in batches of 10, we swap them over at the track, we send the 10 old ones back and then BBk send us another 10. We will have to get fairly organised about this and we will post on here when we have the first 10 available for MRT trade-ins.

Finally we would like to say that we do understand the annoyance of some drivers about being forced to spend more money in order to continue racing at TORCH. Virtually everyone on the committee has at least one MRT. What I would like to say is we have only made this decision after considering all the pros and cons and made a decision on what we think is the best longer term decision for the club. It is a judgement that someone has to make.

Sorry for length of this post but this has proved to be a fairly emotive issue and I wanted everyone to understand the facts and reasons behind the decision.

This thread will be locked and used only for updates on the upgrade process in order that important information and dates are not lost in any continuing debate.

If you do have a question or continuing concerns please contact the committee direct either trackside or via info@torchracing.org.uk.

Cheers

Rob (on behalf of the TORCH committee)