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Electronic Punching at Canonbie.

The club held its first EPS (Electronic Punching System) event at Byreburn Woods in 2002. I took on the job of getting familiar with the system then setting it up and running it on the day. Although I had attended the first SPORTident training course at Glenmore Lodge it was a long time ago and without hands-on experience in the meantime I had forgotten much of what (I thought) I had learned.

I was provided with a laptop and a few base units to practice on and I soon became familiar with the software. There is a manual, of course, and on-line help, but it follows the usual computer rules by being completely incomprehensible until you have worked it out for yourself.

Once you have done this you can then understand what the manual was trying to tell you. Fortunately the software is largely intuitive and it doesn't take long to master it after the basics have been understood. By the time the event came around and we had got the rest of the kit, I was fairly confident that we would have no problems.

Setting up for an event comes down to a very simple process. Firstly, you create a new event, create the classes and courses and expected entrant's club short codes. Then you add the planner's control codes and attach them in sequence to the relevant courses. This gives the computer a means of checking that each competitor visited all the correct control sites in the correct order. A feature of the software is that you can tailor the entries screen to suit yourself. There are even extra columns that you can rename and add. We did this to allow us to enter entrants' age classes even for colour-coded courses.

The second thing we did was master the Layout program. This enables some modification to be applied to the competitor's split-time printouts. We added the club name and slogan as well as the date and place for our next event.

The final task was to program the base stations the day before the event. This consists of downloading the date and time from the laptop so that all the units are synchronised, telling each base station what its control code number is and finally telling it when to wake up and when to switch off. This last action saves battery life.

At the event we were fortunate to have mains power so we did not have to mess about with a portable generator. Setting up the laptop, printer and download unit was quite straightforward. The first competitors rolled up at 10 a.m. and we simply typed in their details along with their assigned SI-card number. Entries were low but we could have kept pace with four times as many. The only problem we encountered was that the download program crashed and we had to reboot. Recovery was total and no information was lost so the system appears to be pretty rugged.

I am now confident that we have the know-how in the club to run an EPS event without hassle.

N.B. About half the competitors had to pay to hire an SI-card for the event. SPORTident is here to stay so it is worthwhile making a little hole in your pocket money now and saving in the future by buying your own. SI-cards can be purchased from Ultrasport, www.ultrasport.co.uk or www, or Compass Point, www.compasspoint-online.co.uk.

Dave McQuillen