With our Twilight events now in full swing and hopefully some new faces undertaking organisational roles, it is a good time to remind everyone of the excellent resourses available on the OT web site to assist you in your roles.  If you haven't done so recently have a look at the Organiser's Toolkit.

In the past a rare total computer failure at an event has resulted in understandable panic. And various kludges such as collecting everyones dibbers in a bag, downloading at a later date and returning the dibbers or doing double prints on the splits printer, writing the name on the second splits, keeping the latter and spending hours manually transcribing all the data afterwards at home.

But there is a simpler plan B.

Batteries of failed SI units are now being replaced locally by Andrew Barber. This will be a much cheaper and convenient process than forwarding these by road transport to the Sportident agent in NSW. In the course of doing the first batch of replacements Andrew remarked that many failures were not of the battery itself but of the soldered wire joint between the battery and the SI unit. The likelhood of such failures would be increased by rough handling of the SI units. So please remember that although the SI units have a tough exterior they contain delicate electronics. Note also that the BSF7 units are no longer being produced by Sportident so we need to look after the ones we have.

The following article is from John's April 2012 Controllers Corner.

I’ve been asked to comment on how the climb is calculated for a course – and in looking at that it is also useful to consider the distance of courses.
Here is what the OA rules have to say about distance for foot orienteering events:
The course lengths shall be given as the length of the straight line from the start via the controls to the finish deviating for, and only for, physically impassable obstructions (high fences, lakes, impassable cliffs etc.), prohibited areas and marked routes.