By Leslie J. Nicholson
Inquirer Staff Writer

Unisys Corp. is known for producing the big stuff: heavy duty business computers, software, and services. One of the Blue Bell company's more successful products, however, was created in an employee's garage.

It is called the Wind Stick, and it is fast becoming a staple on televised golf tournaments.

The Wind Stick take real-time readings on wind speed and direction during golf broadcasts, and sends the information to a little onscreen graphic that bears the Unisys logo.

There are sophisticated electronics involved, to be sure, but some parts of this humble device can be found at a home-improvement store, including a painter's pole and a home weather station.

Nevertheless, the Wind Stick has given Unisys millions of dollars worth of free advertising, and has increased its exposure to an important audience: senior executives with deep pockets and a love for the links.

"These people watch very little television, and what little they do [watch] tends to be sports, and, more often than not, tends to be golf," David Fox, manager of sports marketing for Unisys, said.

Unisys' sports marketing arm has worked with a variety of televised sporting events for two decades. Golf has always been a major focus. The company routinely provides scoring services and related technology for major tournaments.

"Golf, we believe, reaches very clearly our target audience," Fox said. "we’re trying to do a number of things. There is clearly a name awareness opportunity. It also gives us an opportunity to demonstrate our own technology."

Normally, Unisys supplies equipment such as personal computers, network servers, and radio-frequency transmission terminals to gather and transmit leader board statistics and other data.

The Wind Stick is a bit of a departure.

After toiling in his garage for four months, Unisys’ technical manager, Jeff Schroeder, developed the device a year ago. The project grew out of a meeting between Unisys and ABC Sports Television to discuss golf advertising. Unisys wanted to do more than advertise; it wanted to add something to the program. ABC suggested the wind data.

Before the development of the Wind Stick, TV viewers relied on readings that were taken manually by officials walking along the course. By the time the readings reached viewers, they could be three or four minutes old, Fox said.

"And it was something of an average of what was going on," Schroeder added. With the Wind Stick, "you see wind gust and swirl as it happens," he said.

A couple of years before the ABC meeting, Schroeder had mounted a weather station on the roof of the Unisys scoring trailer to provide wind readings to onsite golf spectators and to Internet audiences.

The software engineer's new task was to adapt the system to transmit data from the golf course. "'fire Wind Stick was my deepest foray ever into hardware," he said. "In a big way, if you're doing work with software, you're almost into the hardware anyway."

Schroeder lives in Pensacola, Fla. He joked that he worked on the project at home because Unisys does not have a "Wind Stick development office" in Florida.

The home viewer sees a transparent box with the Unisys logo on top. Beneath the logo are the distance to the hole, a moving arrow indicating the wind direction, and a readout of the wind speed in miles per hour. Viewers usually do not see the stick itself. "Only by accident, because it’s not very pretty," Schroeder said.

With its telescoping handle fully extended, the Wind Stick stands 18 feet tall. Atop the pole are a wind vane, an antenna, and a measuring device called an anemometer. A computer control unit processes the wind measurements, and sends live readings via a powerful radio modem to a computer in a TV production truck.

Stick bearers rush ahead of the golfer to set up the Wind Stick a couple hundred yards away from the hole, out of the player’s site. "it is where the wind would typically affect his stroke the most which is the trajectory down, when the ball has lost most of its forward speed," Schroeder said. Three Wind Sticks are used for most games.

About 50 golf broadcasts have used the Wind Sticks so far, Fox said. ABC was first. It has also been used by ESPN, CBS, the BBC, and Britain’s Sky TV.

Unisys is in talks with networks about using Wind Sticks for other sports, such as sailing, auto racing baseball and football. "Anything that's wind-affected," Fox said.

Neither Fox nor Schroeder plays golf, by the way. Schroeder sails. "That gives me a little better idea of how the wind works," he said.