Name: Loop Ultra Racer
Rating: 4 (8 reviews)
Author: ultra_runner

When you participate in an ultra race on a loop course, you certainly ask yourself questions of the following kind over and over again:

• How far have I been going until now? After tens or even hundreds of laps the distance measured by your GPS device will often be considerably different from the official distance.

• How far will I get – or, depending on the race type, what will my finish time be – if I maintain the current pace? And how many laps remain until there?

• How has my pace evolved lately?

This data field provides answers to these questions and will save yourself a lot of mental arithmetic during your races. It is, of course, targeted at ultra athletes but can also be used for shorter races. The data field continuously switches between the following three screens (each of them contains two values):

• laps completed / distance completed (calculated using the official course length)
• laps to go / estimated result (based on the most recent lap time)
• current (advancing) lap time / average lap time (from the start until now)

Whenever you have completed a lap, a fourth screen appears once. It shows the corresponding lap time in a bigger font and serves as a confirmation for the detection of the lap.

Laps are automatically counted based on your GPS location. The lap counter increments whenever the distance between the current location and the starting location is less than 20 meters. After that you have to increase your distance from the starting point to at least 40 meters before the next lap can be detected. Under most circumstances this works perfectly. However, it will currently not succeed under bad GPS conditions or in UltraTrac mode, but I am working on that.

Since this is a data field, it can be used with any activity that has GPS turned on and can be combined with any other data fields (timer, heart rate, cadence etc.) on a single screen. I recommend using a layout with at least one "wide" field since my data field displays two values side by side and therefore needs more space than others.

The downside of it being a data field (as opposed to an app) is that it cannot offer any kind of user interaction and cannot write any data (e.g. lap times) to the FIT file. But you can of course use it simultaneously with the normal recording functions of your device.

Before use, the data field must be configured via the "App settings" feature:
https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?332843

The following values have to be entered:

• target type (none, time, distance; this should correspond to the type of the race)
• target time (in hours, e.g. 12 hours) *or*
• target distance (in arbitrary units, e.g. km or miles. e.g. 100 km)
• official lap length (in the same unit as the course length, e.g. 1 km)
• display time (time each screen is displayed for, in seconds, e.g. 3 s)

Only one of the fields "target time" and "target distance" is actually used (depending on the value of "target type"), the other one is ignored.

Before starting your activity, the data field displays your configuration and the current GPS accuracy (0-4). The GPS accuracy at the starting point *must* be at least 3, otherwise it won't even try to count your laps.

After starting the activity, the data field switches to normal display mode (see above).

Version history:
0.0.6 (2022-11-23)
• added support for current devices
0.0.5 (2020-02-08)
• added support for current devices
0.0.4 (2019-05-26)
• added support for current devices
0.0.3 (2017-08-11)
• added support for some newer devices
0.0.2 (2016-05-08)
• fixed wrong encoding of "»" character which caused crashes on some devices
• fixed off-by-one error at "display time"
• shortened displayed field title to "Loop Racer"
0.0.1 (2016-05-06)
• initial release
