This afternoon I received an email from an orienteer who had three mispunches, and he wanted to know what happened – he was sure he was at all three controls. He kindly sent me a picture of his results:
Immediately noticeable is the long time to the first control. This is an indication that the runner didn’t punch the start control. But this does not explain the three mispunches, with no extras at the bottom of the page that would show that he had punched the wrong control. So I pulled out our results computer to inspect what information had been downloaded.
Here you see what OE2010 shows for this user. Interestingly Clear, Check and Start are all blank. Also the three controls are blank as expected. The runner used one of our club’s rental timing sticks – an SI-5. Since it’s a rental it had been used the previous week, and I expected to see some sort of time in the Start field.
Time to check the controls!
Here is the Clear control. As you see the finger stick was pulled out before the 
Clear completed. The user was not sure, and tried a second time, but again did not keep it in the control long enough. This would explain why there were no times in Clear, Check or Start: The fields were cleared, but then the Clear time could not be recorded before the stick was removed.
Next the Check control. Here you can also see 
that the user tried twice, but it wouldn’t beep. I believe ErrC means Not-Cleared error – I will investigate this separately for another blog entry.
Now the Start control: Sure enough another ErrC – probably a Not-Cleared error.
Because no Start time was recorded, the event start of 9 o’clock is assumed by OE2010 – this explains the large amount of time up to the first control.
I won’t show what the controls of other than Control #53. The other
two controls showed nothing at all. Again here the user seemed to be too quick on the control and did not complete the download (again, a future blog post will explain the error codes). Interesting here is that this control uses firmware version 580, which does not record the date, only the day-of-week, while the other controls have firmware 656. I like that they show the full date!
In summary, I could show that this user (who has orienteering experience from way back, but is new to electronic punching) did not wait for the beep ‘n’ blink of one of the three mispunched controls as well as the Clear control. It can be assumed that he was even quicker on the other two controls, which did not even register an error.