meshO Manager

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Concepts and glossary ​

Audience: Anyone new to orienteering timing, or new to how Manager models it.

This page defines the orienteering terms and the Manager-specific concepts used throughout the rest of the documentation. You don't need to read it end to end — skim it now, then come back when a word in another page is unfamiliar. Where a term has a page of its own, the definition links to it.

Throughout the docs, italic marks a term defined here.

Orienteering terms ​

The event and its people ​

Event — the top-level container for a competition: its classes, courses, controls, competitors and results all live inside one event. Manager can hold many events; only one is live at a time.

Competitor — an individual participant in the event.

Club — the organisation a competitor represents. Clubs are reused across events through the Club Registry; competitors can be reused through the Competitor Registry.

Class — the category a competitor enters, such as M21E (Men, 21, Elite) or W18A (Women, 18, A-grade). Everyone in a class is ranked against each other. A class is assigned one or more courses. See Classes and courses.

The course and the controls ​

Course — the physical route a competitor runs: an ordered chain of controls from a start to a finish. Several classes can share one course. See Classes and courses.

Control — a single timing point at a position on the map. A normal control carries a control code (the number printed on it and programmed into its unit, e.g. 131), which is how a punch is matched to it. See Controls and radio controls.

Start, finish, check — special controls that mark, respectively, where timing begins, where it ends, and where competitors confirm their card is clear before starting. Unlike normal controls these are codeless — they describe a place on the map, not a code. An event can have several of each (e.g. Start 1 and Start 2 at different locations), and each course picks which start and finish it chains through.

Punch — the record that a competitor visited a control. Most punches are electronic, written to the competitor's card either by touching the unit (contact) or by SIAC "air" punching (contactless). A manual or pin punch is the needle-and-paper backup used when the electronics fail.

Split — the time recorded at an intermediate control, used to show how a competitor's run is progressing and to compare sections of the course between competitors.

Leg — the section of a course between two consecutive controls. (In a relay, leg also means one team member's whole portion of the team's course — see below.)

Relays and teams ​

Relay team — a team whose members each run one leg of the course in sequence, handing over to the next runner. The team's result is the sum of its legs. See Relay events.

Competitor status ​

Every competitor has a status that Manager works out automatically as start times pass, punches arrive and cards are downloaded. The common ones:

Shown asMeaning
(blank)None — no result yet.
On CourseStarted but not yet finished (the orienteering term In Forest).
OKFinished with a valid result.
MPMissing Punch — a required control wasn't punched.
DNFDid Not Finish.
DNSDid Not Start.

There are several more (DSQ, OVT, OOC, NT, NP, CAN). For the full list and the rules behind every transition, see Status and race time rules.

meshO Manager concepts ​

Server / workstation — you run Manager on one computer (the server); everyone else joins from a browser on the same network. There's no per-machine install. Event data lives in Manager itself — there's no separate database — and arrives through imports, manual entry, card downloads and radio punches. See How meshO Manager works.

The life of an event ​

An event moves through a few modes, and what you can do depends on which it's in:

  • Setup mode — the event is being built. You configure classes, courses, controls, competitors and start times. Downloads and live results don't happen yet.
  • Event in progress — the event is live. Card downloads work, radio punches flow in, and results calculate in real time. The event date locks, but competitors, classes and start times stay editable so late entries and corrections still work. You enter this with Start event and leave it with Finish event.
  • Event completed — the event has been finished. The data remains for results and exports.

(Two exception states exist: an event left running when Manager closed shows as interrupted and can be resumed, and one you choose not to resume becomes abandoned.) See the first-event walkthrough for the lifecycle in practice.

How timing data arrives ​

Card — the electronic timing chip a competitor carries (a SportIdent or EMIT card). It records a punch at each control. "SI card" refers specifically to the SportIdent brand.

Card download — reading a finished competitor's card at the download desk. This produces the authoritative result — the full set of punches, evaluated against the course. See Downloading cards.

Radio punch — a punch sent to Manager live over radio as the competitor passes a control, rather than waiting for their card to be downloaded at the finish. Radio punches drive the live picture; the card download confirms it later. See Radio punches.

Radio control — a control whose unit reports punches live (via meshO Prime), so runners' progress appears on the Spectator, Leaderboard and Commentary screens as they pass. A class's radio controls form an ordered sequence (radio 1, radio 2, …), and Manager identifies each split by its position in that sequence rather than by the control's code — the same code can appear more than once in a course (for example a butterfly or loop passed twice), so the code alone wouldn't say which passing it was. See Controls and radio controls.

meshO Prime — the field-unit hardware that receives punches from radio controls and feeds them to the server. It plugs into the server computer over USB. See Connecting meshO Prime and radios.

Replay (test mode) — a training and testing tool that replays captured event data so you can practise or check a setup without a real event. It's not something you use during a live event. See The event dashboard.

Screens and views ​

Operator UI — the Manager admin app the event team uses: dashboard, competitors, downloads, settings and so on. This is what most of these docs describe.

Screens — the read-only public displays you open in their own browser windows and share to TVs, tablets and phones. They include the Leaderboard, the Commentary view for the announcer, and the Spectator / Kiosk views for the crowd. See Creating Leaderboard screens.

Leaderboard vs Results — the Leaderboard is the spectator-facing live standings shown on screens; the Results page is the operator-facing view of the same data, where you publish and export official results. See Results.

Spectator / Kiosk — the public, self-serve views where competitors and spectators look up start lists, live progress, splits and results from their own device or an arena kiosk.

Extending Manager ​

Extensions — optional add-ons you install at runtime to add custom tiles and features (for example a dashboard tile). They're a power-user feature, separate from Manager's built-in functionality. See Installing extensions.

What's shared vs per-event ​

Most data — competitors, classes, courses, results — belongs to one event. A few things are shared across all your events: the Club Registry and Competitor Registry (so you can reuse known clubs and people), and your app-wide Settings. Editing a shared registry affects every event that draws on it; editing event data affects only that event.