OptiTrack started in 2020 as a low-cost answer to a simple problem: how do you let parents, coaches and friends follow a sailing regatta when there's nothing to see from shore?
Back in 2020, the obvious approach — a SIM card and a mobile data plan in every tracker — was a non-starter. Data plans were expensive, commercial GPS trackers cost hundreds of euros a piece, and outfitting a fleet of 20 dinghies for a club regatta was simply unaffordable. So the original OptiTrack design avoided the mobile network entirely. It used LoRa (Long Range radio, developed by Semtech) on the licence-free 868 MHz band in Europe. Tiny GPS trackers broadcast a 20–30 byte payload every couple of seconds; a relay station on the committee boat picked them up over several kilometres and forwarded the data to the server through a phone hotspot. No SIM in the tracker, no per-device contract, hardware around €20–30 a piece.
LoRa was designed for sensors — things that measure temperature or humidity and send a few bytes every so often, over several kilometres, on a tiny power budget. A GPS position is exactly that kind of payload. Most people meet LoRa through LoRaWAN, a network of public gateways that forward sensor data to the internet, but public gateways come with strict limits on airtime and payload size to keep things fair. A regatta needs each boat reporting every couple of seconds, so OptiTrack ran its own private network instead: its own relay stations, and a private sync word rather than the public LoRaWAN one, so the trackers and public gateways simply ignore each other.
The trackers were off-the-shelf development boards that combine a GPS receiver, a LoRa radio and a small microcontroller: the TTGO T-Beam from Lilygo and the CubeCell GPS-6502 from Heltec. Each was programmed to send a packet of 20–30 bytes every two seconds containing the tracker ID, position, speed, time and a bit of housekeeping data. On a single battery they ran for at least 16 hours — comfortably a full race day — and lived in small waterproof food containers taped to the boat, with an 868 MHz antenna, some duct tape for sun shielding and a little silicone to keep the water out.
On the committee boat — where I spent most race days — sat a Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 board, usually with a larger antenna for a bit more reach. It listened for tracker packets and pushed each one out over WiFi using MQTT, a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol built for exactly this kind of small, frequent message. The WiFi came from a phone hotspot, so the one mobile data connection on the water served the whole fleet. Over time we added relays on the finish boat and at mark 1 as well, so a tracker out of reach of one antenna would usually still be heard by another.
Ashore, a server did two things: an MQTT broker received the packets from the relays, and a web server turned them into a live map. Positions went into a lightweight SQLite database and were streamed to the browser over WebSockets, where an OpenLayers map redrew the boats as each update arrived. That pipeline — broker, database, WebSockets, map — is still the core of OptiTrack today; only the way positions arrive at the front door has changed.
All in, a tracked boat came to well under €50 with no running costs — a fraction of what a commercial tracker with a data contract would have cost at the time.
Things have changed since then. Mobile data has become dirt cheap — a few cents a day is enough to keep a tracker sending a position every couple of seconds — and the hardware market has caught up too. Mass-produced Chinese vehicle trackers now sell for €15–25 and have largely closed the cost gap that made LoRa necessary in the first place. So the platform has opened up: it now accepts position data from almost anything that can speak GPS.
Bring whatever you already have, mix and match across a fleet, and only pay for the days you actually race.
Questions? Email info@optitrack.co.
