Big thanks to Backcountry Access for sponsoring this avalanche education content. Check out the additional plethora of avalanche safety resources on their website.
Mammut recently replaced my failed Barryvox Beacon — no word yet on what was wrong with the one I sent back. Enclosed with my new beacon was an extensive diagnostic checklist. All passed of course, but what would one expect of a new unit? If I get the diagnostics from the broken one I’ll blog here.
Meanwhile, the electronic locator market is alive and well in other areas of life. Check out the Loc8tor (defunct link removed 2015). The concepts this unit uses are cool, and the claims it makes for performance are incredible: Finds items up to 600 feet away, guides to within one inch, knows what it’s searching for (per a pre-registered name). Makes our avalanche beacons look like stone age clubs? And it’s only $100.00, though from the looks of their website it might be vaporware. We might get one just to play around with and see what other’s are doing with locator tech (unit as advertised is obviously not for backcountry skiing, but the ideas are there.)
2 comments
Funny you should mention electronic locators… I was just researching these ( http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=671 ) today. While this isn’t a beacon by any means it looks like it has potential as a trail tracker. I would like to get one simply to know how fast (or slow) I was going at any particular point on a trail. and the Google earth feature is nice. It’s pretty bare bones so the possiblites for water proofing are endless I suppose. Anyways… enjoy.
Nice idea – shame it’s using the 2.45Ghz band, same as a microwave oven:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven
It’s likely to perform poorly through snow as lots of the available energy will be used to heat up the snow.
I like the idea of using RFID style technology to identify individual victims. It could even be extended to allow people to search for lost skis etc as a ski would be completely differently identified to a person. The advantage would be more practice especially for new powder skiers! Some detail required here to ensure that people don’t find the ski and leave the victim.
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