Orienteering Commentary Case Study

The British Orienteering Championships were held in South Wales in 2007. The organisers wanted to add a live commentary to enhance the atmosphere in the finish arena. They first contacted GPProjects about 6 months before the event and informed about whatt they wanted to do, they also told us that SportIdent had been selected as the provider of timing hardware. Furthermore Michael Napier had been employed to provide results services.

Following discussions with the orgainser and planner GPProjects were engaged to provide all of the commentary services for the event. This included provisioning the commentary box and PA system, we also provided all of the computer equipemnt and radio links to provide the commentators with up to the minute information from the radio cointrols and the official results system.

Typically a large orienteering event in the UK will enable the following controls for commentary purposes:
1) Pre-warnings before any spectator control
2) Pre-warnings before the last or penultimate control
3) The last control
4) The Finish Line
5) The half way control of the elite races
6) Any controls that alter the race timing (E.g. Timed road crossings)

BOC 2007 was pretty normal, it was decided to enable the following:
1) Three different penultimate controls
2) The last control
3) The finish line
4) Four timed road crossing controls
The commentary logistics form from the British is available for download for information.

Normally penultimate controls are within 1.5km of the arena and so standard OTS hardware can be delopyed. The event organisers were able to confirm successful radio communications between these sites and the arena prior to the evnet and so OTS hardware was reserved for these links.

The last control and finish line are within site of spectators and so the latency of dfata from the controls to the commentators becomes important. To remove the radio delay it was decided to run cables to these sites, this meant that only Merge units were required to link the multiple SportIdent master stations together and convert it into RS422 which can be transmitted over such a distance.

Although the road crossing data itself was not of interest to the commentators, since the planners had decided to make it a timed road crossing, it was essential to relay all the data from both sides of the road crossing so that the OCOMM software could provide corrceted times for all the online controls approaching the finish. The planners were able to confirm that the road was too far from the arena to be suitable for standard OTS hardware, however there was excellent mobile phone coverage at the crossing and the Arena. It was decided to use the Osprey GSM hardware to relay the data back from the road crossing to the arena and we opted to use Vodaphone since they had the most cost competitive SMS pricing.

On the day the Projects team started on site around 7:30am, with the radio controls all in position for the first start. The commentary system was also setup and operational for 10am when the commentators themselves arrived to do their job. The OCOMM software provided by Michael Napier was configured to provide data views for the commentators, focussing on the elite races, whilst also having waterfall displays showing the leaders in all classes at the penultimate, last and finish controls. The road crossing data was not planned to be viewed, however in the end the commentators opted to use this data point too, since it was approximatley half way around the elite races. Over the course of that day the GPProjects hardware delivered successfully over 9000 competitor data records to the commentary system, 3000 of which were delivered by the Osprey SMS system.