[ARDF] Designing Championship Courses...

[Marvin Johnston]

Matthew Robbins wrote:
> 
> I've tried to design a nine-category course, and immediately ran into
> difficulty, mostly because I'm used to some software for regular
> orienteering course setting.  You can manually enter a category, say
> W19: 1,3,4,5, but you have to enter each possible order if you want to
> look at them all.  Then, you have to page through to look at and
> compare each order.

The easy solution to that problem is to use OEScore rather than the
standard OE orienteering (defined route) software. This is the software
that we used at both the 2004 and 2005 US ARDF Championships.


> Often, as Bruce (?) has also mentioned, the "shortest" order isn't an
> order anyone would actually pick.  I think a lot of ARDF is using
> rules of thumb to decide what to do next.  You have to be careful with
> the output and consider more than just the straightlines and some
> crazy shortest order.

One of the things I've learned in course setting is to try and design
the course so it *is* possible for competitors to find the shortest
course. The mistake I made on the 80M Mt Pinos course for the 2004 US
ARDF Championships was to located the transmitters so that the first
route choice decision (left or right about 200M down the start
corridore) was based on guesswork.