Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, January 04, 2003 E is for electronic punchingIt seems to me that electronic punching is one of those solutions looking for a problem. The regular punches that have been around for years do the job pretty well. Electronic punching is cool. But, like using a GPS for making an O' map, electronic punching isn't necessary and doesn't change the sport in any important way.I've used both Emit and SportIdent and don't have a preference one way or another. Poking around the web, I found another electronic punching system called etime (I think it is using something called Ibuttons) Reading various O' forums on the internet, I bump into a lot of debate about the merits of the different systems. I don't pay any attention to the debate (even me, a serious O' geek, could care less about arguments for and against the two systems). SportIdent is well established in the US. I don't think any US events have used Emit. Tore Sandvik who wrote an article on his homepage called "Back to regular punches" where he discussed his experiences with both SportIdent and Emit. The article is in Norwegian and I don't have the motivation to translate it, but if you can manage the language, it is a reasonably interesting article. I think the most interesting and useful thing electronic punching gives us is the chance to look at huge amounts of data on how people orienteer. At a place like winsplits online you can look at splits from races all over the world. You can begin to answer questions like -- do people frequently boom the first control? How often do people boom the first control? If you boom one control are you more likely to boom the next control? Do winners tend to "win" a lot of legs? posted by Michael | 11:47 AM 
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