A veteran SAR volunteer's experiences in British Columbia
I’d like to direct people to Will Gadd’s article on the SPOT Connect. I’ve previously written how smartphones should not be used as a primary navigation device for backcountry travelers. Will points out that the SPOT connect, when paired with …
Radio scanners have been around for a long time. They basically allow people to listen in on radio conversations. Most radios have a scan function of some sort. When I got my first radio I could even use the scan …
Smart phones are problematic for backcountry navigation; they are fagile, have terrible battery life, and are less accurate than a wilderness GPS unit.
On May 4th I attended the Canadian Avalanche Association’s annual spring conference and continuing professional development seminar. This year’s topic was Avalanche Search and Rescue in Canada. There were some very informative presentations, but one piece of information stood out …
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 …
An article about recording and transmitting geographic coordinates accurately.
I got a GoPro Hero camera for Christmas. I figure since I do some exciting things on occasion I may as well record some of them. I have a few friends who’ve bought this camera, and almost everyone has seen …
I analysed some numbers on SAR Incidents in British Columbia and made a few graphs showing how the frequency of incidents changes with the season.
I’m used to the pager going off in the middle of the night, but believe it or not I have had “emergencies” in my other line of work (software engineering) as well. One such happened last Wednesday. In my day …
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 …