What is LS4P?

LS4P (LiveSailing For Professionals) is the ultimate system for sailing professionals in order:

• To improve their sailing skills
• To watch and supervise a regatta

LS4P is commissioned by the GSA with funds from the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development of innovative applications for the mass market.

EGNOS and the European GNSS relevance

The 'mass market' edition of LiveSailing provides a comprehensive race coverage including 3D reconstructed virtual images.The standard GPS terminals commonly used by this 'mass market' edition revealed not to offer enough positioning accuracy and reliability to meet more severe requirements than the ones needed for race event broadcasting.

The future availability of the EGNOS and European GNSS systems now delivers a very precise and reliable positioning capabilities which offer new perspectives for the development of the LiveSailing for Professionals (LS4P) applications.

How does it work ?

Boats and buoys are equipped with wind and positioning sensors.
All those information are transmitted over the air in real time and recorded in a database.

After a race, a sailor can understand how good he was during the race ? How far was he from the theoretical performance of his boat?
During a race, the race organizers can:

• have a certified ranking
• have a certified list of boat that took a false start
• have a very precise wind measurement even when the boat is moving

The LS4P trials

The LS4P system will be tested in real conditions for a two-months period, especially during the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta, 9th - 14th August 2010 at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy (UK)

Who is involved in LS4P consortium ?

This consortium is built around 3 world leaders:

• Septentrio (Belgium), the first company to have launched Galileo receiver and one of the leader of GPS/Glonass receivers.
• Royal Yatching Association (Great Britain), the organization in charge of the training of the English Olympic sailing team. The Olympic team is considered as the current best team (they won 6 medals in Beijing 2008)
• BeTomorrow (France) the leader in multimedia dedicated to sailing. BeTomorrow has been involved in all the sailing major events: America’s Cup, Olympic Games (Athens and Beijing) , Vendée Globe...