British Sprint Championships

[HOCOLITE]

Right
Defence of EMIT- I have been told to send the card back immediately and it wil be sent to Norway for testing. I will get a replacement. They have been having some probs with batteries in cards of a certain age. So the after failure support service is fine. But......

[Snail]

I'm not convinced that Emit is suitable for large-entry sprint races without ensuring multiple units at most control sites. It seems to take many people much longer to punch (for whatever reason) than with SI, and in a sprint race any delay tends to be more significant. (I think in the heats there were something like 24 tied places.)

[roadrunner]

In fact, I think this next statement sums it up quite nicely:

"The primary reason people dislike/hate EMIT is because they don't use it often enough, and hence don't fully know how to operate the card/how the system works"

I'm sure that's the case for some people, but not by any means for everyone. Clubs in the SCOA area often use Emit, so we know how it works, and for sure it has some advantages, but I certainly find aligning the brick on the unit takes longer than for SI (OK, I know you don't have to align it, but as others have said, then you lose the backup). Also, this isn't the first time a hired card has failed at an event - it happened at the Concorde Chase a year or two ago.

[ruth]

[quote="GML"]Be warned - checking the scrolling bars doesn't help if the controls are so close together that the bars are still scrolling from the previous control when you (mis-)punch the next one.[quote]

yeah this happened to me in the qualifier too, the last few controls were all so close together it was just continuously scrolling, very annoying as I checked the bars religiously!! I ended up going back to a control which i thought i'd missed and ending up getting a mp anyway because it was a different one that i/d missed..I was on for the A final too!

i just think that emit is totally unsuitable for sprint races.(obviously touch free is fine) Putting controls that close together is great planning and great planning should never be compromised for poor equiptment. I think the arguement that its people's responsibility to punch correctly, and I should have looked at the brick when it was in is completely stupid. If this is a sport to see who can punch the best then i'm out, it just shouldn't be this difficult to punch all the right controls once you've managed to find them!! why not make it as simple as we can to see who are the best orienteers?! Enter touch free. (and don't say its expensive..this is the British Elite Sprint Championships...)

Its a real shame because the area and the planning were fantastic, and it was one of the most enjoyable races i've ever run in Britain. I hope people take this on board and don't use emit for sprint races in future.

[SJC]

I am beginning to think that I am the only person in Britain who has never had a problem with EMIT, nor with SI for that matter. It is just a matter of practice to get a clean punch every time. ( Excepting the unfortunate situation of anyone who experiences a card or SI Card failure.)

In the days of control cards, good punching technique was worth many seconds at each control. The same is true with both electronic punching systems. SI is undoubtedly easier to get to grips with to start with, but EMIT is definitely faster once the technique has been mastered, and it doesn't have the annoying bleep which gives the control away to anyone within earshot.

There is too much investment for either system to disappear, so we will all just have to make the best of them both.

[Roger]

SI is undoubtedly easier to get to grips with to start with, but EMIT is definitely faster once the technique has been mastered, ...

Agreed, on both counts.

Emit saved me in the qualifiers. Something felt wrong when I left control 23: the description for my next control seemed to be too far down the description list. I stopped, and realised that the display on my card was reading '23' - i.e. I had punched the start / wake-up unit and 22 controls, so the next control should have been #23. So I'd missed a control. After an expletive, a look at the map revealed that I hadn't visited 22. (23 had been visible from soon after 21, and its site of course tallied with a red circle on my map; I'd gone straight to it.)

Without the Emit visual display I'd probably have realised only at download. As it was, I was able to go back to 22, then 23 again, and complete the course successfully.

[Harley]

Emit saved me in the qualifiers. Something felt wrong when I left control 23: the description for my next control seemed to be too far down the description list. I stopped, and realised that the display on my card was reading '23' - i.e. I had punched the start / wake-up unit and 22 controls, so the next control should have been #23. So I'd missed a control. After an expletive, a look at the map revealed that I hadn't visited 22. (23 had been visible from soon after 21, and its site of course tallied with a red circle on my map; I'd gone straight to it.)

Without the Emit visual display I'd probably have realised only at download. As it was, I was able to go back to 22, then 23 again, and complete the course successfully.

I think that this shows that Emit has strayed from its core functionality of recording the times that the Orienteer has visited each control. Is this extra functionality either desirable or within the rules of getting external assistance on one's course.?

Surely the first requirement of completing an orienteering course is that you do so using a compass (if you wish) and the supplied map with no external help. You would probably all agree then that it would be wrong to have a person at each control who would check that you have visited the last control correctly. Yet somehow it is OK to employ technology (in the shape of the emit screen) to do the same?

However, if we agree that it is OK to use such technology, at each control site, to help us complete our courses, what other technological assistance are we going to allow? What about a liitle help between controls rather than just at the control. For example, rather than use a traditional compass to set our direction of travel and then try to stay on line, what if our compass could talk back to us, berating us with "left a bit, right a bit"? I think you would all agree that this would be contrary to the rules of the sport. But I don't see a huge difference between this and an emit brick telling us whether we have visited the conrols in the right sequence.

In my opinion the feedback screen on the emit brick, if not contrary to the rules of the sport, is probably not in the spirit of the sport. By allowing such technological assistance are we in danger of opening the floodgates to what might become a full GPS enabled sport unrecognisable from true orienteering?

[brooner]

I think that this shows that Emit has strayed from its core functionality of recording the times that the Orienteer has visited each control. Is this extra functionality either desirable or within the rules of getting external assistance on one's course.?
...

You would probably all agree then that it would be wrong to have a person at each control who would check that you have visited the last control correctly. Yet somehow it is OK to employ technology (in the shape of the emit screen) to do the same?

But this very same thing could happen with pin punching, Roger would have got to #23 and punched in the #22 box and would have (possibly) had a similar revelation that he'd missed a control.

Lets just go back to pin punching, much easier all round

[Harley]

Damn! the flaw in my argument.

[IanD]

In my opinion the feedback screen on the emit brick, if not contrary to the rules of the sport, is probably not in the spirit of the sport. By allowing such technological assistance are we in danger of opening the floodgates to what might become a full GPS enabled sport unrecognisable from true orienteering?

I would draw the line regarding the spirit of the sport in a different place.

I think the sport is about navigating, and that something which which might indicate where you are on the map (e.g. GPS) would be clearly outside the spirit of it.

I did wonder why we think a compass is OK and GPS isn't; whether it was just because one is new and the other old. But I realised that there's a more fundamental difference, a compass is within the spirit of the sport because it only shows which way you are facing, not whereabouts you are.

Going back to the information on the EMIT screen, the information is all historical. Did your last punch register, what was the control code, how many punches have registered altogether, how long have you been running? Nothing there is helping you navigate to your next control.

So I think EMIT feedback is within the spirit, and Harley is worrying unnecessarily.

As for whether EMIT or SI is better, I'm staying out of that one, beyond commenting that I prefer EMIT for score events since I'm forever forgetting to start my stopwatch!

[EddieH]

Taking this topic even further off the original subject:

IanD writes "a compass is within the spirit of the sport because it only shows which way you are facing, not whereabouts you are."

When abroad, and it seems to me increasingly here, people use people to find out where they are. Just leg it in the general direction, then ask! This is clearly neither within the spirit nor the rules, yet there is no will to stop it even by the IOF at the World Masters Championship.

Don't kid yourselves - major events have been won this way, including once I know of the O-ringen Men's Elite 1 winner.

Whilst this is condoned suggesting that an EMIT display is againsthe spirit seems a bit OTT.

[Harley]

Wot? me? ... OTT? perish the thought

[Adventure Racer]

As for whether EMIT or SI is better, I'm staying out of that one, beyond commenting that I prefer EMIT for score events since I'm forever forgetting to start my stopwatch!

It also has the advantage of being able to confirm how many controls you've been to when going for clearing the lot - when pin punching I tend to check how many empty boxes I have when nearing the end, whilst with SI there is no way to check this.

[King Penguin]

Were it not for battery life implications, I think the biggest single improvement that could be made to EMIT would be for it to beep on successful punching, like SI. I know it's not good control flow, but I'm usually too busy looking at the map for the next control to worry about scrolling bars, so I usually resort to the slower 100% flat punch method.

[awk]

"The primary reason people dislike/hate EMIT is because they don't use it often enough, and hence don't fully know how to operate the card/how the system works"

In my case it's more distrust than dislike, which actually is far worse. Emit has failed me far more than SI, even though having used it far less often. If Emit was reliable, and didn't so often have to depend on backup, then far fewer people would dislike it.