Personal Locator Beacons from the Rescuer’s Perspective
A case study of a rescue with a Personal Locator Beacon in SouthWestern BC detailing rescuer’s difficulties accessing the location.
Tag: map
Why you shouldn’t use Smart Phones for Backcountry Navigation
Smart phones are problematic for backcountry navigation; they are fagile, have terrible battery life, and are less accurate than a wilderness GPS unit.
On Coordinates; part 2
GPS Track of helicopter flight into the Pitt River area.
In my previous post on coordinates, I stated that the best coordinate representation to use if you need to use geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) was decimal degrees (or DD). It’s preferable to use UTM, which is pretty much a …
On Coordinates
SAR Member using a map
An article about recording and transmitting geographic coordinates accurately.
Maps vs. Air Photos
Now that everyone with an internet connection has access to Google Earth and Google Maps, we all have access to some fairly high quality air photo imagery. This might seem to be a good thing, but there are problems with …
GPS vs. Paper Maps
Ever since I saw my first mapping GPS I’ve been pretty critical of them (well, those that know me know I’m pretty critical about everything). To be clear I’m not critical about the basic utility of plotting your position on …
SAR Day 6: Navigation part 2
Regular training day with navigation on the schedule. Map and compass. In the past 10 years, the biggest errors in navigation I’ve seen have all been variations on transcription errors. What happens is this: people will report their position using …
Cell phone locations
The SAR team has had a run of searches at inopportune times. The first one was after an all night search, so we rolled from the first search, into breakfast …
Excercise SILVER
An Earthquake near Tsawwassen, a structure fire on Hamilton Street, a gas leak at Robson and Cambie, and a dirty bomb in Agasiz. Just another day in Excercise Silver. Silver, the second in the series of preperatory emergency excercises leading …