SIAC (contactless punching) is it catching on?

[SeanC]

I need to buy a new SI Card as my son snapped his (it was 15 years old, so I let him off ).

I was thinking of buying a SIAC contactless/air punch SI Card and wondering if the extra money is worth it. Is it catching on, or is it going to be a betamax type technology and not catch on/replaced by something better?

I know clubs that use SIAC punching will hire them out, but I'd rather avoid hiring to save mine and the volunteers time

[Gross]

I've never bought an SI card of any description on principle (established may moons ago as an EMIT fan) !!

But getting old and mellowing and about to buy one.... I don't see any point in not getting the 'top' version... in the great scheme of things they don't cost so much.

[Arnold]

It is irritatingly expensive (the margin on each must be gigantic), but the answer is definitely yes.

The key driver is that mixed punching has been allowed - which is blantantly unfair for sprint if you don’t have SIAC, so it drives adoption. (It clearly is unfair despite all the arguments from SI that you can get similar advantages from other types of kit eg a faster compass, which don’t hold up. But I can see that SIAC would not have happened otherwise).

Though interestingly in Ireland they’ve decided that for their sprint champs they don’t want mixed punching so Elites have forced SIAC and the rest forced non-Air.

[RJ]

At WCOC all of our events are contactless enabled. Of those who attend our informal events during the course of the year 43 have their own SIAC cards. Numbers are increasing all the time. It will just be a question of time before they are the dominant ecard, and then we will wonder what all the fuss was about.

[SeanC]

OK I bought one and handed down my old series 9 SI Card. I've spent about £150 on dibbers in 17 years, doesn't seem too bad.

One good thing about SIAC cards, assuming we get to the point that most orienteers have one, is that it gives a good incentive for new orienteers to buy one and stop hiring (assuming non SIAC is for hire).

I'd like to see SportIdent create a SI Card with a GPS tracker.

[mharky]

...The key driver is that mixed punching has been allowed - which is blantantly unfair for sprint if you don’t have SIAC, so it drives adoption. (It clearly is unfair despite all the arguments from SI that you can get similar advantages from other types of kit eg a faster compass, which don’t hold up. But I can see that SIAC would not have happened otherwise).

Let's not confuse unfair with unequal.

Everyone has an opportunity to purchase a SIAC card, and everyone has the opportunity to hire a SIAC card. The outcome of using one versus the other is certainly unequal, but it is fair. It is your choice to use one, it is your choice to not use one.

"But they are expensive!"

Yes, having to spend £63 is a lot of money to some people. But people spend way more than that on other aspects of their orienteering. Perhaps it is unfair that some people have more money than others, but I'd prefer keep my arguments to orienteering rather than socio-economic philosophy.

So, richer people can afford a SIAC card, but they can also afford:

Not to work, to train full-time.
To live in a great place for orienteering.
Technical training camps in the UK and Europe.
Racing trips all over the UK and Europe.
Private medical care for surgery, physiotherapy, and massage.
A car.
A professional personal coach.
Gym membership, a personal trainer.
Top of the range GPS watches and training software.
Better food.
Replacing worn out shoes and reducing injury risk
A library of sports books and subscription websites full of knowledge
Altitude training camps, or an altitude chamber at home.

And, performance enhancing drugs.

There are many things that are unequal, but they are not unfair and we should not be attempting to hinder the advancement of technology because early adopters can afford the advantage it provides.

If you want to talk about unfair, then maybe we should be talking about physiology and genetics... or the lack of doping control in veteran/masters orienteering.

[mharky]

But, back on SIAC.

If you can afford it, have both versions. Using a SIAC card for a non-SIAC events will drain the battery.

[Gross]

or the lack of doping control in veteran/masters orienteering.

Never mind banning individuals.... we'd be banning entire age groups

[Snail]

From a competitor perspective, I fully understand why individuals like SIAC.

But from the organisers' perspective it is significantly different. Accidents happen. And it can take a very long time to find someone in a deep ditch / depression / heather in a large forest.

Enabling contactless SI punching for an event currently means deliberately disabling the facility to record when competitors have been at a control, for anyone punching in contactless mode. Even if the chances are very small, why would any organiser / controller / club want to risk appearing before a coroner's court to answer a question like "The injured person / child might not have died from hypothermia if they had been found sooner; you had the technology available to be able to quickly narrow down the search area; how can you defend deliberately turning off that technology simply in order to save competitors a few seconds in a 60+ minute competition?"

Even if the officials / club are somehow comfortable addressing that question, they still face a risk of some form of duty-of-care legal action against them. And further that our insurers might say that by deliberately disabling a safety feature they are partially negligent, so partially liable.

Unfortunately the UK case law legal system means that it isn't clear that they are absolved from responsibility simply by saying "the competitor had a choice, and chose to use SIAC". Probably more so if using mixed-punching at something like a selection / championship event where competitors are incentivised that saving seconds is important. Or by being able to point to technologies like Emit that don't have the same ability in the first place.

Had Sport Ident not provided the feature in the first place it wouldn't be an issue. But unfortunately by providing it and then withdrawing it for SIAC use they have created a problem.

My understanding of our club policy is that until something like:

• Sport Ident start recording contactless punches in the control box; or
• there is a test case (hopefully in another sport) that clarifies organiser / participant responsibilities; or
• BO's insurers explicitly state that they are happy for the organiser to disable the safety feature and still provide 100% cover

we won't enable SIAC for forest events.

Urban events that are entirely street-based are different, as the chances of an injured competitor not being found quickly are fairly minimal.

[NeilC]

Is your club's decision based on the fear of litigation or because you actually believe that the inability to identify the last control punched is a significant safety concern? I know of other clubs local to mine that share that latter view.

We can all imagine a scenario whereby a competitor falls into a ditch and knocks them-self unconscious. And yes, in that one scenario knowing where they were on their course would be useful information.

More likely is that a competitor twists an ankle, perhaps breaks a wrist or suffers a serious wound. In that situation the whistle becomes a very useful tool. A very simple solution but are clubs considered negligent for not enforcing the carrying of whistles at every event? Perhaps they should be.

Lost competitors have proved to be a bigger problem for my club than injured competitors. And in my experience these tend to end up a long way from where they should be. If this is generally known to be the case then while restricting your search to the region between two controls might seem sensible - but may actually reduce your chances of finding that person. Even very experienced competitors do very stupid things at times.

It's a complex situation and it's easy to see both sides of an argument. From a litigious point of view I would accept snail's club's argument, but from a practical point of view I worry that knowing where a missing competitor was on a course can give too much of a sense of security and could actually hamper efforts to find them. There is the argument that an injured competitor should be considered more of a concern than a lost one - (who is likely to turn up somewhere, sometime) and so you should work on the premise that a missing competitor is injured. But is that valid?

[Paul Frost]

I think I'm right in saying that you can't interrogate Emit controls to find out who has been there. So does that mean a club that uses Emit is being negligent as there is a technology available that does record punches?

I've been on computing when someone hasn't downloaded and is considered lost/missing. Waiting for all the controls to be collected and then checking each one for the missing competitor is very time consuming. I can also remember that we did trace the last control that was punched by the missing person, and in this case the competitor eventually turned up and had gotten so lost he was off the map. So restricting the search wouldn't have found him.

[SeanC]

Look Neil and Paul, it's too late - I've spent my money

Seriously though, I'm surprised there's no official guidance on "how to do a search for a lost competitor" (or at least I couldn't find any on the BO site). That would be a useful document. A quick google returned this: https://sectionhiker.com/how-to-find-a-lost-hiker/

OK, I'm going to sound a bit ungrateful, but I'm a bit underwhelmed by SIAC. I can see that if you're an elite orienteer and/or doing a sprint event it's a big improvement, but 98% of orienteering isn't like that. Punters like me in a forest event will be stop start anyway - I can't run though much of that stuff. I'm going to stop a tiny bit less with SIAC that's all.

Electronic punching was a revolution and gave a massive boost to the sport but that was 20 years ago. We're overdue another one. This isn't it.

Combined electronic punching and GPS tracking - now that gives possibilities:

- When I finish, instead of a splits printout, I get a map showing my actual route for instant feedback on my performance.
- When I finish, my route automatically gets loaded into RouteGadget, so I can replay my run against my friends on my phone in the pub afterwards, and the planner gets really good feedback straight away.
- Because we now know my true speed and distance, splitsbrowser can become much more accurate and interesting.
- I'd like my sons SI Card it to link to an app on my phone so when he rings me and tells me "Dad I'm lost come and find me" I can do that quickly so he can continue on his run rather than spend 15 minutes working out where "some trees in a field" is (with his motivation disappearing).
- The organiser can display live positioning of all competitors trac trac style so if anyone does get lost or injured, they can position the competitor quickly and safely.

I'd happily throw away yesterday's £60 investment for that

[Karen]

Question for Mharky:
Do you mean that using a SIAC card on non-enabled control boxes actually uses more battery life than on enabled controls? Or that I should just save using my SIAC card till its really needed? Thanks

You have heard this before, but as a competitor I love contactless punching, SI or Emit. I can wear the card on my wrist which means less damage to my fingers, as I have Raynaulds (very poor circulation in hands). Should keep me orienteering for a few more years...

[keduro]

seanC wrote:
Combined electronic punching and GPS tracking - now that gives possibilities: ... I'd happily throw away yesterday's £60 investment for that

Many of us already own the technology to do this in our mobile phones. Imagine an app that could:
1. track your GPS position and communicate it back to assembly for real time tracking
2. detect Bluetooth beacons placed at each control site as evidence of visiting the control and communicate a "contactless punch" back to assembly for tracking intermediate times
3. use the phone's camera to scan a QR code at assembly to set up the event in the app
4. use the phone's camera to scan QR codes at control sites as a backup to using Bluetooth beacons
5. provide an "I'm lost or injured" button that a competitor could press to communicate a message including their GPS position back to the organiser
6. monitor the phone's built in motion sensor (accelerometer) and if no motion is detected and the competitor has not finished then communicate a message including the GPS position back to the organiser indicating that the competitor may be injured/unconcious (or they have dropped the phone)

The above assumes that there is adeqate mobile data coverage in the area. The app could save all the GPS and punch data until it can make a connection. Ideally assembly would be in an area with mobile coverage.

The app needs to be supported by a web based application which gathers the GPS and punch data and displays it on an image of the orienteering map. The web based app also needs to handle the "I'm lost" and "I'm not moving" messages.

This is very much doable. What triggered my thoughts on this was being part of the WOC2015 IT team and experiencing first hand what was involved to integrate contactless (SAIC) punching, radio controls, and GPS tracking. After WOC I developed an Android app that provided the points listed above, and developed a web based application that imported map images and Condes event data and allowed real time presentation of GPS tracks and "contactless punches" based on using a few RadBeacon Dot bluetooth beacons I bought for £10 each.

For sure there are challenges such as:
- many do not want to carry their mobile phone while running for fear of damaging it. If using the Bluetooth Beacons then there is no need to handle the phone at all whilst running so the phone could be protected and stashed in a bum bag, or perhaps a vest as used for the GPS trackers
- the phone must be adequately charged before the event
- adequate mobile data coverage on the user's network

For one reason or another (like who'd have believed retiring would have resulted in less rather than more available time ) my efforts on the app and the web app ran out of steam. However I still believe the concept is sound. SportIdent and EMIT might not be too happy as a £10 Bluetooth beacon is much less costly than a £80 to £120 control unit.

Offered to stimulate further discussion

[Homer]

Question for Mharky:
Do you mean that using a SIAC card on non-enabled control boxes actually uses more battery life than on enabled controls? Or that I should just save using my SIAC card till its really needed? Thanks

I'll answer on Mharky's behalf.

I think he means that it's a waste of your SIAC's battery if you use it on non-enabled controls. I have kept my old SI card for use at non contactless events so that the battery in my SIAC lasts longer. (Except now Marge has lost her card I'm having to use my SIAC all the time )

BTW I still feel uncomfortable with mixed punching. I saved quite a bit of time at one control on Arthur's Seat where I was able to punch a crag foot by leaning over the top of the crag.