Discussion: Thoughts on OWA using SI Air for Auschamps 2023?

A lot of our community is split on whether we should use SI Air for the 2023 carnival. Being the shit-stirrer I am and not going about it maturely, I'll ask what the community thinks first.

Pros of SI Air include:
Much faster Courses, Perfect control flow, Best for Professionalism

Cons of SI Air include:
Money, Money, Money, Programming, Programming, Batteries.

None of those cons are cons. The only con would be making sure to switch the units over to daylight savings time midway through the carnival so that the eastern states contingent don't get confused when the sun comes up at the same time as it did the previous day.

I agree with tRicky, no cons. I'd rather do an SI air event because it is easy and exciting and fast and furious and all the good stuff.

Though I'm no longer WA community, I am someone who may decide to pay the "more expensive' travel costs (given almost any other state is cheaper to get to) to fly over to Perth to compete and visit family. I wouldn't be so keen to go if there wasn't SI air.

I would mention that Orienteering USA just permitted mixed punching (competitors may use either Air or traditional SI card; controls are enabled in beacon mode) for our Junior Nationals 2 weeks ago, the first time that mixed punching has been permitted in championship eligible classes for a USA championship event. There were no problems. The host club has been using Air at approximately 40 local events per year since we re-started holding events in June of 2020, and has yet to notice a significant increase in battery depletion.

Rental Air cards were offered at the Junior Nationals for a small fee above rentals of a normal SI 5, or as an upgrade from the participant's own traditional SI card. Of 275 entries, 6 people who owned their own traditional cards chose to rent Air cards and 5 of the 10 who had no personal SI card upgraded their SI-5 rental to an Air card. This would appear to demonstrate a very small demand for Air from those who do not already own a personal Air card.

What is mixed punching?

@TT, mixed punching is what we do all the time, ppl can use Air if they want, but dont if they want to keep a older stick

Left jab followed by right hook.

The biggest Con on SI air is the time that the control is programmed to stay on. Whereas a non Air event unit gets reset every-time someone punches it, a Air unit can only be reset with someone not using it in air mode.

Mixed punching is what they do at Melbourne street O if you don't have MapRun. Take a paper control card and record that you were there with a pen. Totally not open for abuse!

When was the last Aus champs/Easter 3 days that didn't use Si Air?

Easter 2019... in WA.

Didn’t we get warned that we would get fined or banned from hosting a carnival until we get some LOL

WA does have SI Air capability (just reprogram the normal bricks) and it has been used before at the state MTBO Champs in 2019.

I'm sure WA's additional GST allocation will help fund SI Air :)

SI Air would help to protect cavemen from covid carried by infested over-easters.

+1 to Shingo. We are talking about Vexit locally.

Surely this isn't worth the time of discussing and the angst caused? Just do it. People can choose whether or not they want to use the Air capability. This should not be a topic of discussion in this age. Many local club events now run on Air. If competitors don't want to buy a new stick that's fine, they can still punch as normal. I have spent the last season punching manually because I have a flat battery. Its not a problem to use either method.

I think it's more a WA Council issue than a competitor one.

Pin punching is the way to go.

I haven't heard any discussion about this by the OWA Council. I was wondering who the people are that Riley has talked to who are against using SI Air for the Aus Champs.

Not Council, but the organising team. AFAIK Riley hasn't spoken to any of us - I'm not sure he even knows who we are. And at present we're still working to firm up reluctant (due to Covid) landowners so tech details for the events haven't even been discussed.

In 2019 there may have been an expectation which we didn't meet because the KISS principle and uncertainty about mixed punching at the time we were planning, ie late 2017/early 2018.

New OA/NOL/WRE rules since then still don't stipulate the use of SI Air, but mixed punching is now readily available. It appears that most, if not all, elites are using SIAC cards, but the take-up amongst other classes, including hiring at national carnivals, appears quite low. I can't see this changing much, so mixed punching is going to be needed for quite a few years. In other fields of technology prices seem to come down quickly, so why aren't SIAC cards reducing in price? (Not that it would make a lot of difference - there are an awful lot of orienteers still using SI5 who presumably won't change until their card stops working, breaks, or gets lost.)

I hear so much about mixed punching, but to me it's just punching. Anyone with a SI card can punch, you can even punch the traditional way with a SIAC if you choose to not activate it at the start

> so why aren't SIAC cards reducing in price
Lack of competition due to first mover advantage.

It doesn't really matter what the discussion is here on AP, the Aust Champs organisers will of course eventually decide to give SIAC owners the opportunity to use them in Air mode (if they have got around to replacing the batteries), because it's illogical and unpopular to not do so, and this is what is expected of international-standard races; these will of course be WREs.

(When the OA Rules Appendix on use of SIAC/mixed punching was reviewed a couple of years ago, the main change at that time was to no longer mandate carnivals having hire SIAC available, because the information from the organisers of Oceania 2019 was that hire uptake was much lower than SIAC ownership. 5 years down the track, many more people will have their own SIAC, and hopefully not all of these will have flat batteries yet.)

I don't think the discussion is around the use of mixed punching but whether SI Air will be used at all. At this stage the only compulsory use of SI Air is for high level MTBO events because the new units can't use older style punching.

I'm confident that it will be :)

After all, OA only just took reference to manual punching being an option, out of the rules from this year, and yet it's been a very long time since any championships organiser dared to suggest that it would be too expensive and complicated to use SI and competitors should all be given manual control cards!

It doesn't really matter what the discussion is here on AP

Especially since the OP explicitly stated that he was trolling. *rolls eyes*

@juffy +1

We just held our first National Ranking Event ("A-meet") in three years---the US Junior Nationals---and I ran download. It's astonishing how many people have SAIC "air sticks" now.