The schools events are always good to use the O-Lynx technology on as with as you get a lot of spectators unfamiliar with orienteering coming out for the day. Providing good commentary and the live results boards means they are able to stay involved for the whole day, rather than just wait at the finish line for Johnny or Jill to suddenly appear. The Local schools events are also made a lot more enjoyable because they have primary school classes and its great to see the young kids out having fun orienteering.
O-Lynx radios was used on each of the courses as early warning controls with about 2 or 3 controls for the competitors still to be punched. For the Red and Orange courses this meant their radio controls were just inside the forest about 700m from the finish. The yellow and white courses used a control visible to the spectators just across a valley. Two repeaters were used – one on the hill just above the event centre and one for the red medium control that was tucked into a re-entrant.
School coaches made a lot of use of the results displays to keep an eye on how their school was doing for the overall results. They were also busy picking their teams for the Hawkes Bay Schools Relay event in 2 weeks.
OE2010 was used to manage the event and with O-Lynx Sync now updating finish punches it was good to see any errors such as incorrect SI cards managed automatically with no manual intervention on my part for the whole event.
New this event was a panel layout showing the commentator the current runners information along with what else is happening in that class. The panel shows the current first 3 places along with the information on runner in front and runner behind him/her. The custom panel designer built into O-Lynx results was used to design the panel layout.