After putting together a grand plan for using my mini tablet as a portable image file transmission powerhouse, yesterday it was time to put it to the test.I was at Wembley for Focus Images to cover the richest single sporting event in the world, topping last night's Champions League final said to be worth a meagre $77m by Forbes. I am of course referring to the Championship Play-Off Final - the last game of the Championship season which sees the winner bag the last remaining promotion place to the Premier League. Worth £120m to Derby or £80m to QPR, it dwarfs the £10m that Real Madrid won last night. So, a big game then, and a good opportunity to try out the tablet thingy as a way to get images out to the Focus Images remote editing suite extremely fast with minimal human intervention. The idea is that I simply need to plug the card into the reader and the images are sucked off, into the tablet and over to Focus by FTP automatically.First things first - I arrived at Wembley three and a half hours before kick off and snuck the bike into the car park for free before joining a surprisingly short queue, with most of the glitterati of the football photography world off in Lisbon for the Madrid derby. After a brief briefing on the order of proceedings for the day, it was off to capture a few shots outside the ground of supporters and suchlike. Looking for some alternatives to the rather frequently shot Wembley Way scene, I took myself to the top of the Hilton Hotel opposite the ground where the Sky Bar provided a most obliging view of the scene of thousands of supporters streaming in. Having failed to plan properly, I didn't have a wide enough lens to take in the whole scene (I was on 24mm), but I was quite happy with what I ended up with. Happily the hotel security guards didn't bat an eyelid as I wandered purposefully in and out.Back in the stadium I started to get prepped for the game. With my laptop already set up and filled with the squad lists and all the right captioning information, and plugged into the pitchside wired LAN, I set about getting the Asus tablet ready to go as I wanted to use it as my primary wiring tool. However, I hit problems immediately and the situation rapidly deteriorated.Firstly the tablet decided it didn't like any of my three USB card readers which it had been perfectly happy with an hour beforehand. It kept popping up a "USB device not recognised" error. What? Bloody thing. A reboot sorted that out though, and I was good to go.My next step was to get the tablet online. At Wembley you are provided with a network login and password, and I quickly found that you can't be logged in using two computers at the same time! This applies to both the wired and wireless networks so I couldn't get the tablet online. Aaagghh - not a good time to find this out. I couldn't risk not having my laptop online as a fallback, so I decided to use my EE 4G wifi modem, figuring that as all the adverts said Wembley is "connected by EE" it should work OK.It then started pouring down - a proper downpour which I have to say looks like good preparation for Manaus. None of your nancy drizzle, but torrential rain which hammered down onto all of us, resulting in a scurry to put on any waterproofs that weren't already on.Kick off time crept closer and closer as the rain hammered down. I had a sophistated waterproof shield for the tablet (a plastic freezer bag) so I could use it in the shower if I wanted, which at least proved that part of the plan. The touch screen worked fine through the bag as well which was another good test.I could connect the tablet to my EE modem over wifi, but although the modem was showing a full 4G signal the transmission rate was so slow that the tablet could barely log in to the Focus Images FTP server. Aaagh! Minutes ticked by. The editor was screaming for some pictures of something, but I couldn't get the tablet to send anything. Note to EE - get your bandwidth planning sorted out for a full stadium please - check what O2 have done at Twickenham for an example.Tick tick tick - kick off and the game is under way. Still no comms. I cant open my case to get my laptop fired up as the rain is still hammering down and the laptop is already soaked. Must get some early pictures out. Rain rain rain. Risking electronic disaster I opened up the case and the laptop and got it up and running, and onto the fixed network at last.John at Tilebarn had rushed together an update to his AutoCopy application to enable it to copy to more than one destination at once (along with a number of other enhancements). This clever app recognises a memory card being inserted and automatically copies all locked images from it. I wanted to be able to copy to my Lightroom "watched folder" to auto-ingest the pics into Lightroom, and also to another directory which would be synced with the Focus Images FTP server using software called WinSCP. WinSCP has an extremely useful "keep synchronised" feature whereby any files added into the local directory are automatically synced with the remote directory.More rain, and with the laptop getting soaked I wanted to close it and my case, leaving a little gap to slot cards into the card reader. However, my laptop decided to stop me changing the "choose what closing the lid does" function from "sleep" to "do nothing", so when I closed my laptop it powered down. Not good. Whatever I did (bear in mind it is still torrential rain and the game is under way) I could not change this setting - it just remained greyed out. It even said "Your power plan information isn't available. Access is denied". Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhh!!!! It's my computer dammit!! Trying to prop open my case just enough so the laptop lid doesn't close, yet far enough to stop it filling with water, were unsuccessful.I hate this sort of situation, where a technical issue distracts you from shooting the game properly. I admit to having got extremely flustered yesterday as I had everything in place, and my editor was waiting for pictures, but tech problems just kept mounting up one after the other, compounding the stress levels exponentially. There was some swearing. I guess it's the price of trying to push the envelope at the extremely low end of the budgetary scale.Happily the rain eased off enough for me to prop the case open and get some pictures going. From this point on, everything worked like a dream, with me just popping a card into the reader and the pictures firing off over the network in seconds. It was quicker to ship the pictures out than it was getting them ingested into Lightroom - fantastic. I could relax a bit and focus on shooting the game properly.The game itself was pulsating. The atmosphere was crazy - I'd positioned myself at the Derby end for no particular reason, and their fans were superb. The noise was astonishing, with a full capacity crowd of 82,000 or more. Derby were sure to win, with QPR reduced to 10 men after a foul by Gary O'Neill on Johnny Russell saw O'Neill sent off. Derby were bossing the game, and kicking my way in the second half. I was sure to get a superb winning goal and celebration which would be sent in seconds and on the newspaper picture desks seconds after that.But no - Zamora scored at the other end in the 90th minute and all hell broke loose in the QPR end of the stadium. Madness! Derby players couldn't believe it and collapsed to the ground. I was bloody annoyed knowing the main pic of the game was at the other end, but more because this would mean jogging around 3 sides of the pitch to get in place for the trophy lift. Great. Had I had my little tablet running I could have taken that with me and wired pictures while away from my laptop. The final whistle blew and several Derby players hit the deck again while QPR went crazy - in fact my best pic of the day was Jake Buxton lying head down on the grass with QPR leaping on top of each other in the background. That just summed up the whole game.Then it was the expected jog around for the trophy lift in front of the QPR fans and the expected gentle but firm squabble for good positions, shoot a bunch of pictures and then back to the laptop to wire them away, tidy up any remaining shots, and pack up.Lessons learnt? Suss out the pitchside comms earlier so it's possible to get another login if required, or whatever else I need to do. I hadn't bought a battery-powered wifi router which would have helped significantly as well, so I definitely need one of those when I go to Brazil to plug into the pitchside LAN and make my own fast wifi network. However, aside from the comms issue the tablet would have worked fine. Being able to use it in the rain will be a real benefit as well, and being so small I can keep it in front of me when pitchside space is bound to be at a real premium.Also - figure out what's going on with my laptop and why I can't change a simple power setting. Do this ahead of the game and test it as well - the laptop needs to work when closed. Once the comms on the laptop were sorted everything worked like a dream, with remote editing letting me focus on getting the shots I needed. Next time will be better.Roll on Brazil - only 17 days to departure...EDIT: After doing some research (typing "can't change power options" into Google) it turns out that there's a Samsung Control Centre application with a "Fast Start" function. Turning this off re-enables the settings for the "close lid" function so I can now set my laptop up to keep running with the lid closed. But how annoying is that. It's so frustrating when manufacturers put some crappy layer of supposedly helpful twaddle on top of the operating system and basically screw it up. Anyway - now sorted.