Libre Aquatics Wiki
Navigation

Colorado Time Systems Multizone Pads

From Libre Aquatics Wiki, the free aquatics reference

EquipmentTimingSwimming

Edit View source

Multizone Pads is a name Colorado Time Systems (CTS) gave to a swimming touch panel in its 2008 catalogue. The company listed it among its training tools and never described it: no part number, size, price or photograph accompanies the name, in that catalogue or in any other source consulted for this article.1 By the 2011 catalogue the name is gone.2 No evidence has been found that the product was built or sold.

The 2008 catalogue listing

CTS’s Making Time Count catalogue, published in 2008, opens its Training Tools section with a strip naming what the section covers. Six items appear there, and Multizone Pads is one of them, alongside the Pace Clock Pro, the QuickStart Pro, relay judging platforms, touchpads and an underwater speaker.1

The section that follows covers the QuickStart Pro at length, down to its display size, weight, power and the contents of its one-lane bundle, and gives the underwater speaker its own entry. It never returns to the Multizone Pads. The name appears once in the 32-page document and nowhere else in it.1

A contemporaneous patent application

This section sets out an inference rather than a documented connection, because it is the only candidate explanation the record offers.

On 23 January 2008 CTS filed a patent application titled “Aquatic Event Timer Apparatus and Methods”, published the following year as US 2009/0185455 A1 and assigned to the company on the day it was filed.3 The application describes two or more independent touch-actuated switches, each 16–58 in wide and 1–3 ft high, held side by side on a structural connector and fitted inside a single regulation lane of 5½–9 ft, sitting at the lane end and at least partly underwater. Each switch carries a visual design a swimmer can distinguish from the one next to it, the assembly takes either gutter or flat-wall mounting hardware, and it wires back to a timer. The stated problem is that a competition touchpad fills more than half a lane, so swimmers sharing a lane in training cannot each have automatic timing.3

The name Multizone Pads describes a lane divided into separately timed areas, and the application comes from the same company in the same month as the catalogue carrying that name. The application was abandoned on 26 August 2011, after CTS did not respond to an office action, in the same period the name disappeared from the catalogues.32 Against that, the application never uses the word multizone and names no product, so nothing in the documents themselves ties the two together.

What Colorado Time Systems sold instead

The training pad CTS did sell is a smaller version of its ordinary competition panel rather than a divided one. The Train Right package pairs a pace clock, a pushbutton, a relay judging platform and a start system with a 30-inch “mini” touchpad, or a 76 × 90 cm pad on the 220 V versions, as TR-SYS-1 and TR-SYS-2.4 By 2011 that package had taken the Multizone Pads’ place in the Training Tools list.2 For competition CTS sold the Standard touchpad and, from 1998, the AquaGrip touchpad, both full-lane panels with a single active face.

Documentation status

The record for this product is one line in one catalogue. There is no CTS manual, form number, datasheet, product page or press release for it, and no part number has been found, which leaves its size, construction, sensing method and price unrecorded. Beyond the single catalogue mention it appears in no other CTS document and nowhere in the swimming press. No dealer listing names it. A trademark search was attempted and could not be completed, so whether CTS ever registered the name is unresolved.1

Absence of a record is not proof that nothing was built. A product CTS named in a catalogue left no other trace in the sources available here, and the company’s training-tool listing had replaced it within three years.2

See also

References

Footnotes

  1. Colorado Time Systems, Making Time Count: High Impact Visual Display Systems (2008 catalogue), Training Tools section. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Colorado Time Systems, Complete Timing, Scoring, Training and Display Solutions (2011 edition), Training Tools section. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. US Patent Application 2009/0185455 A1, Aquatic Event Timer Apparatus and Methods (Colorado Time Systems; filed 23 January 2008, abandoned 26 August 2011). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Colorado Time Systems, Train Right System datasheet (TR-SYS-1, TR-SYS-2; 30-inch mini touchpad or 76 × 90 cm pad). ↩

Last updated September 17, 2026.