Tuning a Gate
A gate only records a lap when the drone's signal gets stronger than one level and then drops back below another. Those two numbers are called enter and exit.
If those numbers don't match what a real pass looks like on your track, the gate either misses laps or invents them. The Tune page is where you set them — one node at a time, while somebody actually flies through the gate.
There are two different "tune" tools. This is the hardware one.
This page tunes the gate, ahead of time. It writes the enter and exit levels to the timer so future passes are detected properly.
Marshaling's Tune detection is the after-the-fact repair. It works out one pilot's laps again from a race that already happened, and never changes the timer.
Gate wrong → use this page. Recorded race wrong → use Tune detection.
Open the Tune page
Tune appears on a timer's row in two places, and which one you use decides what you're editing:
- Timers on the home screen → Tune — the timer's own baseline. This works before any event exists, which is the usual case when you're first setting a gate up.
- Inside an event, on its Timers page → Tune — the same page, opened within your event. Back returns you to the event instead of the global list, which is what you want when a heat is waiting.
The page says which one it's editing at the top, so reloading — or opening the same link somewhere else — keeps the scope you started with.
The button only appears on a timer that has a gate to read, and stays disabled until the timer is connected: "Connect ‹Timer› first — tuning reads its live signal."
Take it to the gate on your phone
Tune is a real page with its own web address, not a pop-up window.
If you're running the web version, open the same address on your phone and watch the signal in your hand while you walk a drone through the gate. That beats walking back to the laptop after every change. It survives a reload too.
What you're looking at
One column per node, laid out like RotorHazard's own tuning page:
- The live signal graph for that node, updating constantly.
- The enter and exit lines drawn across it.
- The crossing band — a shaded block that starts the moment the signal goes above enter and ends when it falls back below exit.
- The node's numbers underneath, and which pilot is on it.
The crossing band is the thing to watch. It answers "did that pass actually register?" A signal number on its own can't tell you that. If a drone flies through and no band appears, the gate did not count it.
A node your timer has never reported is drawn as dead, not as a flat quiet line. Those two look identical otherwise, and they need opposite fixes.
"No signal" and "no connection" are kept apart the same way. If the feed itself has stopped, the page says so rather than showing you a quiet gate.
Set the enter and exit levels
Each level has three controls, all changing the same number:
- the number box, for a value you already know;
- the slider, for one you're feeling out;
- the handle on the graph, for one you can see.
There is no Apply button. The value goes to the timer as soon as you let go. Nothing to forget, and no tuning against a level the hardware never received.
Instead of an Apply button, each level shows a status:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Adjusting | You're moving it right now. Nothing sent yet. |
| Sending… | GridFPV took it and is waiting to see it on the timer. |
| On timer | The timer confirmed it has this value. This is the normal resting state. |
| Not taken | The timer kept reporting something else. The change did not land. |
That confirmation is a real read-back from the hardware, not just "the request didn't error". If it says Not taken, the timer did not accept it — and GridFPV says so loudly rather than letting you tune against a number that isn't really there.
Capture a level from a pass
Instead of guessing a number, you can let the timer measure one.
Capture watches the gate for three seconds starting the moment you press it, and sets the level from the signal it sees. So press it first, then fly the pass.
Use Capture Enter at from a pass or Capture Exit at from a pass on the node you're working on, then fly through within those three seconds. If nothing crosses, nothing changes.
Set a node's channel
Tuning a gate is pointless if the node is listening on the wrong channel, so you can set the frequency right here from a dropdown.
GridFPV writes the band and channel name to RotorHazard, not just a bare number, so RotorHazard's own screen shows R7 next to the frequency and you can check the change landed.
Starting a heat will overwrite this, and that's correct
Staging a heat re-tunes every node to the channel its seat is assigned.
The channel you set here is a bench value for tuning, not a race assignment. Race channels come from the roster, the heat, or a channel layout.
Changing the channel does not move the levels
RotorHazard stores a node's frequency and its enter/exit levels together, so switching a node's channel leaves the old channel's levels sitting there. They look fine.
Fly a pass on the new channel before you trust them.
When tuning is refused
Changing a level changes which laps the gate counts. So GridFPV refuses while a competition heat is running on that timer:
A competition heat is running — changing a gate threshold now would change which laps it counts. Tuning resumes when the heat ends.
This is checked on every change, not once when the page opens. A heat that starts while you're standing at the gate will start refusing mid-session.
Practice is different — you can tune during it. Practice isn't scored, so there's no result to damage. And pilots being in the air is exactly when you want to be tuning. With no heat on the timer at all, tuning just works.
Watching the gate during a race
You can't tune during a competition heat, but you can still look.
Race Control has a read-only Gate signal strip: the trace, the level lines and the crossing marks for each gate, and nothing that changes anything. It's collapsed by default and remembers that per event. Even collapsed, its header shows a live dot per gate, so a dead node is obvious without opening it.
That's what tells you which of three problems you're looking at when a lap doesn't appear:
- the drone put out no signal at all — a dead video transmitter, or the wrong channel;
- the drone crossed but not strongly enough to trip the gate — a levels problem, fix it here after the heat;
- the drone never crossed — they missed the gate.
All three look identical on the leaderboard. They need three different responses.
A gate that reports the same pass twice
If a gate is very sensitive, it can report one drone going past as several crossings a fraction of a second apart. That's not a levels problem exactly — the gate is working, just enthusiastically.
GridFPV handles this with the timer's same-pass window, which groups those repeats together and keeps them out of your lap list. See gate bounce.
It's worth knowing the difference:
- Missing laps → the enter and exit levels are wrong. Fix them on this page.
- The same lap counted several times → gate bounce. Handled by the same-pass window, though a lot of it is a hint your gate is more sensitive than it needs to be.