building electronics beacon for survival

Hell, why both getting rescued? just build a nice shelter make a bow and some arrows (I always have my 60lb draw compound bow in the trunk) and hunt the local wildlife. Gawd what a awesome vacation I'd have. In the spring when the loggers come back I'd hitch a ride back to civilization and pay frigging taxes again...

and no fryng pan?

There are standard frequencies and transmitters just for this purpose. On VHF, there.s 131.5MHz, 262MHz. Somewhere up in the 440's there's a frequency that's picked up by recon satellites, triangulated or dopplered into a location, and sent down to Earth stations. Most every plane has a locator beacon that goes off and signals the satellites if the plane makes any abrupt gyrations, like during a crash. The beacon is located at the top of the tail so it's likely to be able to eject itself before the plane goes under water or underground.

There's not much point in building your own.

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Top posters.

AZ Nomad wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ip70-176-155-130.ph.ph.cox.net:

seems they were able to "ping" his and the other snow-trapped folks cellphones when they were turned on,even though there were no CP towers around.

Maybe they have an air-mobile CP relay on the rescue aircraft?

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik

Be a wild man and fry it on the end of a stick, over an open campfire.

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prove it.

The EPIRB service was originally designed for ships, and it's not really designed to scale to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users; I think that's why you don't see government agencies suggesting that, e.g., everyone or every vehicle should have an EPIRB.

That being said, there's no reason a system designed for a much larger user base couldn't be deployed. It's the usual millions of dollars in funding to put up a satellite that's the hold-up, I imagine -- the question being whether the money could save more lives if spent differently.

---Joel

Modern cell phones are required to have GPS capability for 9-1-1 location.

Around here they offer "track your teenager", so the technology already exists.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |

No they don't. They'd be 4 times bigger if they had a GPS receiver. Perhaps you're thinking of cell tower triangulation.

See:

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How about not traipsing up the side of a mountain in the middle of a blizzard?

I wonder what the tab was for that "rescue" mission?

FWIW, there have been survival beacons for decades.

Good Luck! Rich

Yeah, and just stick a little Honda 1.5 KW generator in your backpack to power all this crap....

Cheers! Rich

Some cell phones do have GPSs, and the phone isn't any bigger. However, the law stated that the cellular providers have to be able to locate a phone. There is no legal requirement for a GPS in the phone.

When I had a phone with GPS, I kept the GPS off except for 911.

Thank you for all your suggestions.

Let me add another comments. I notice many animals in the wild were tagged for searchers to uses electronic tracking devices to locate for studies. Can you tell me more about these tags devices and tracking instruments? Why can we build these simple low cost, small and light tag devices. Leave it in car or carry in backpack with the tag turned off. Turn it on when you are loss and wait for rescuer.

Make sure to notify family member of which tag devices you carry. So that rescue searchers can use the correct tracking instruments.

Ditto that, 121.5 monitored by aircraft and coast guard and a "registered" product on 406 for sat rescue.

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MAybe not every vcehice, but here in australia it should be compulsory for any vehicle leaving a major outback highway.

What is there now works resonably well. Millions of EPIRB's does not mean that there is going to be millions of activated EPIRB's.

You can buy these transmitters. See

or wildlifematerials.com for instance. They are about $130 for a collar used with a bird dog or hunting hound. The ones for civilian use generally use 216 - 220 MHz. The receiver uses a directional antenna (yagi or similar). The primary restriction for use with animals is the weight of the transmitter, which has a direct impact on range and battery life. The two restrictions for using it for a rescue situation would be that it is approximately line of site only (limited in a mountainous environment), and the searchers would need to know what frequency you were transmitting (and hopefully not have anyone else in the area transmitting in the same frequency).

--
Steve

I can see the U.S. easily adding one hundred million EPIRBs with its population, and with China (long-term) you'd probably get another quarter billion. With those kinds of numbers, even with only 1 person in a million inadvertently activating theirs every day, you're looking at a significant increase in the funding needed to kept the program going.

I'm not claiming it's a bad idea, just that there'd be a significant political fight to get the funding. The Wikipedia article mentions that the original program was initiated after two U.S. congressmen died in an airplane crash... I'm sure the current situation would be different if it had been, e.g., the Bush twins out there.

I'll definitely heed your advice and take an EPIRB with me if I visit the Aussie outback someday.

---Joel

The law states you must be able to locate within some number of feet (anyone have the spec on how many feet?). In some high density places that can be done with triangulation. In the boonies it requires GPS.

AZ is the boonies.

Is AZ Nomad really in AZ ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |