SI weirdness

[Angry Haggis]

Interesting SI problem I came across at a race today.

On finishing, I was recorded as having missed two controls (I was sure that I had visited them and heard the SI unit beep.) However, two other control codes were printed. The odd thing about these codes was that they didn't correspond to any controls out at the event - valid codes were all between 100 and 200.

Control 135 was missed - but I had apparently visited a mystery Control 67.
Control 123 was missed - but I had apparently visited a mystery Control 61.

The numbers will be physically stored on the silicon inside the SI card as binary. Converting these to binary:

135 = 10000111, 67 = 1000011
123 = 1111011, 61 = 111101

So, in both, the last bit was missing.

Something to bear in mind when suffering a surprise disqualification (in the event, I had my result reinstated.) Looks like the SI unit maybe doesn't re-query an SI card properly to check successful recording, before beeping? Either that or my SI card has bit rot.

[Ed]

there's been similar problems at events here in Germany. Tracked down to the download station being in "fast read" mode (or some such). In all cases, deleting the result and downloading again solved it.

Something for download teams to be aware of!

[SIman]

We had exactly this problem a couple of weeks ago. I contacted Martin Stone and he deduced correctly that we were using a BSM7 unit whose software hadn't been updated. He was correct and now that we have used SIboot to install the latest software (version 5.56) we have had no repetition of the weird effect.