Discussion: SIAC at the Finish

Here's hoping jSh can give us the benefit of his wisdom regarding the article on page 29 of the latest Australian Orienteer.
In particular, should sprint events have a contactless punch at the Finish (and possibly using a BS11-BL station), while for forest events a manual punch may be better assuming most SIAC users are not aware that the contactless punch does not record until you move away from the control?

Ah that's what you were talking about (I finally read it). If they're going to have a dip punch at the finish I wish they'd inform the competitors about it! At the Sydney Sprint events referred to in the article, all events for the Saturday and Sunday used an Air finish but the Monday epilogue required a manual dip (I ran past it).

Also it's not abundantly clear the sentence stating "The athlete must not stop or slow down at this station in order to get his time, but just run close to this." Is it merely referring to the fact you don't have to slow down or hit the brick (watch the finish of the men's final at SSW for a perfect example of this) to record a time? It doesn't specifically state the need to move away but seems to be inferred by the writer of the article. The finish brick switches off your SIAC so it's not actually possible to record a second or third time as is possible for bricks in the field (which happens regularly at MTBO events with BSF11 stations).

tRicky I guess a punching finish is standard for those ACT events, but agree that since they might occasionally get interstate visitors there should be something in the Series info, or on the Eventor page, or an announcement at the event to warn you.

Re SSW it sounds like they used a BS11 at the finish.

No just a standard BS8/9 with 30cm range. One or two people still managed to be too far away for it to register (of those who didn't smack the brick) and had to go back.

I am pretty sure that the statement in that article that "Your time registers after you have left the control's field, so to finish you must move out of the control's field" is fake news (for SI - although I believe it may be true for old-fashioned EMIT).

If your SIAC is beeping and flashing at you, it means that the timestamp has been written to its memory. Punching a finish unit also turns the contactless mode off (as tRicky rightly says), so the only way that the finish timestamp will be overwritten with a later time is if you subsequently go and punch a finish unit with what the Sportident docs refer to as a "classic punch".