Rod,
Sartin programs since about the mid 1990's have made use of TrackMaster/Equibase DTV and ITV adjustments. Arguably, unless one is a diehard do-it-yourself type, or simply has a
better idea, any of the pre-fabricated, commercially available sets of DTV/ITVs (e.g. HSH, HDW, CJ, TrackMaster) would seem to leave more time in the handicapper's hands to do the real brain work of race analysis and wager strategy. If the end goal is to make money, I'd argue for deploying scarce resources (brain time) where needed the most i.e. not grunt calculation work.
Unfortunately, TrackMaster DTV/ITVs (like HDW) have always been embedded in data sets provided for their or 3rd party software (e.g. Sartin stuff) and so aren't much use without the accompanying software, and not much use for individual home-made applications.
Then again, I'd also make the argument that winning money is more important than tinkering with software (unless one is a tinker). You could try on one of the Sartin programs (e.g. RDSS) and contrast its outputs to your Excel analysis (both for time cost and cyclical effectiveness). Even throw up some mystery races and get a round-table analysis here of how different handicapping approaches (even with the same software, data and adjustments) could shine some light. For example, to see how one would analyse a race
without knowing how the track was playing (no model), compared to knowing which readouts to favour if you
had a recent model (e.g. the Early/Late range). Just throwing out ideas.
And I see Charlie's RDSS settings above aren't using TrackMaster's ITV and DTV settings anyway
- but there you go. They also spell and talk funny across the pond (Brit).
yours,
Ted