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Orienteering Canada Newsletter May 2020, Vol 30 View this email in your browser

May 2020, Volume 30

Hello Welcome to the newsletter. Submissions for the next newsletter are welcome. Please send them by the 15th of each month to [email protected]. We aim to get the newsletter out by the end of each month.

News from Orienteering Canada COVID-19 and orienteering We let clubs and association know last week that Orienteering Canada is not covered (as with most sports) for any liability claims arising from infectious diseases. This means that no group orienteering activities will be sanctioned (meaning: eligible for insurance coverage) by Orienteering Canada until further notice. Group orienteering activities are anything that is not self-directed. Self directed includes activities where you go out on your own time, by yourself, or with a group from your household “bubble”, where there are no race officials onsite, and where courses have been made available for people to use over an extended, multi-day period of time. Self directed orienteering as per our previous communications of March 25 is reasonable and will be sanctioned (meaning: eligible for insurance coverage) as long as the requirements outlined in the March 25th communication are met. A reminder that: > the activity must be set up by a properly trained official > the activity fits within the regular standards of the sport and the organizer has made attempts to reduce known risks > anyone who participates in your activity must be a registered member of your club (this can include a “day-of” member) and must have signed a waiver. What’s next: Our insurer (who handles many sport organizations in Canada) is currently working with an underwriter who hopes to develop an insurance product (coverage) that would potentially cover liability for contagion. We are hopeful this may happen in the next few weeks. We are working with them with the intent that this would be a good solution for orienteering events. We are creating guidelines for group orienteering safely within the context of COVID-19. If your club/association wishes to collaborate with us on the development of these guidelines, please contact tracy AT orienteering.ca

Let’s Talk Orienteering Join us via zoom every few weeks to talk about various orienteering topics. Details are at: www.orienteering.ca/2020/04/talkorienteering

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Orienteering Simulation Exercises – available temporarily at no cost Check out our Orienteering Canada’s Simulation Exercise Program. This program has been designed both as a training program for our High Performance Program (HPP) athletes and as a fundraiser in which orienteers across Canada can gain access to the exercises being done by our HPP athletes. Under normal circumstances we would be providing these exercises in return for a donation to the HPP. However, for the duration of the nation-wide lockdown due to COVID-19 we are providing access to these exercises for free. More details at: www.orienteering.ca/2020/04/simulation-exercises

2020 Annual General Meeting The 2020 Orienteering Canada AGM has been scheduled for Thursday, July 23 at 5pm Pacific / 9pm Atlantic. It will be held as a virtual meeting via zoom.

Canadian clubs and associations needing to meet virtually – Orienteering Canada can help Orienteering Canada is offering (at no cost) its conference call line and Zoom account to any Canadian orienteering clubs or associations who would like to use either of these accounts to meet virtually during the COVID-19 crisis. You can use a free zoom account for meetings under 40 minutes, but if you need to meet for longer, a paid account (like Orienteering Canada’s) is required. Contact [email protected] to book.

Gene Brenda (1933-2020)

Long time orienteering Gene Brenda of passed away in April from cancer. Gene was involved in orienteering for decades, as a participant and prolific organizer. Our sincerest condolences are with Gene’s wife Marg and their family. You can read Gene’s obituary here.

Using your Smartphone for orienteering during times of COVID- 19

Thank you to GVOC member Robyn Rennie for this submission.

In an attempt to continue hosting our weekly training events, GVOC looked at the various options for “Virtual Events” or “self- distancing events” using some of the orienteering apps that make use of the GPS in the average smartphones. There seems to be three main apps available:

iOrienteering – Scott Sheldrake from VICO tried this for his first Virtual event. This involves putting up QR code posters around the course and then having people install the app which reads the QR codes and registers that they are at the correct location. This proved not to be very efficient as the QR code posters started to disappear and it still involved some setup and cleanup after the event.

Usynligo.no – an app out of Norway which appears to turn your phone into a compass and then using an uploaded course you can find your way around the course and the phone will play a little tune when you are at the correct control and a different tune if you are at the wrong control. Forest Pearson from the is trying this one out and Pam James from NB gave it a try. It uses the output from Purple Pen or Condes to upload the course to the phone and displays it over regular satellite imagery. It also allows you to upload a map as a PDF file to display on your phone. Setting up this app is relatively easy however does require that your orienteering maps are correctly georeferenced when you do your course planning.

MapRunners – a website out of Australia, sponsored by the Australian Orienteering Federation with the MapRunF app. This is the app that GVOC ended up going with. It requires a map and a course file to be uploaded to the phone. As the runner moves around the course, the phone will beep when a control is

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passed. Runners can either use just the phone map or print a map and put the phone in a pocket and use it “kind of” like an SI Air unit. Results, including splits, are reported and uploaded to a Route Gadget site so make for interesting comparisons. The hardest part of setting up these apps was getting our existing map collection into a good georeferenced state such that the features on the maps line up with the features in Google Earth, as this is the reference system that the smartphone uses. Many of our older maps weren’t georeferenced at all. Many of our newer maps had a coordinate system on them but seemed to be in the wrong location on the earth’s surface. However, after Scott worked on an extensive document detailing the steps required, along with the quirks of all the software involved, both GVOC and VICO have managed to put up quite a number of courses on a variety of maps which are available for members to use at whatever time works best for them. To help make the set-up easier for course planners, Daniel Widmann has also written a couple of tools to convert Purple Pen and OOM course files into the required format for MapRunF. We have done both urban sprint style maps and a couple of heavily forested maps. The accuracy of the control locations, in general, seems to be good and the app uses a 15m tolerance so close enough is often good enough. The phone GPS software seems to be the weak link in the process as similar phones can show quite different responses to the controls and the resultant track is often wildly inaccurate. This technology will never replace the SI units but it has allowed us to provide interesting contactless, socially distanced, weekly training events during this time. Over 25 members have been using our latest courses, and we try to have one new location with medium & long courses each week. If anyone is interested in our document detailing the steps involved in setting up our maps please let me know. Robyn Rennie GVOC / Gvoc.events (at) gmail.com

Looking back at the 2020 Sprint Camp

You can read this recap of the 2020 Sprint Camp at this link. Thank you to GVOC member Robyn Rennie for this article.

Contacting Orienteering Canada Are you wondering who to email at Orienteering Canada with your questions, comments and ideas? Orienteering Canada's email directory is handy. You can also find this on Orienteering Canada's contact page.

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Donate

We are setting up an Endowment Fund to help develop financial sustainability for Orienteering Canada. Please consider making a donation to our Endowment Fund Campaign. Tax receipts available.

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