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The county of Santa Barbara, Calif., contains more than 2,500 square miles of breathtaking and sometimes dangerous terrain, including rocky beaches, unblemished coastal islands teeming with wildlife, and the steep inland mountains of the Los Padres National Forest. Such picturesque wilderness, within easy driving distance of Los Angeles, attracts thousands of visitors every year. Most enjoy the county's beauty without incident, but sometimes accidents happen. When things do go wrong, the members of the county's search-and-rescue team are responsible for finding and rescuing missing and injured persons within the region's backcountry.
Responding to reports of lost or hurt individuals on the county's hundreds of trails and peaks raised safety concerns for the search-and-rescue team's volunteer members. Although searchers are trained in the latest safety procedures, the remoteness of the terrain and the challenges of operating in small teams meant the risk was high. According to Nelson Trichler, an incident commander for the team, it was clear that some sort of radio-based GPS tracking solution was needed.
"Each searcher could carry a GPS receiver with them in the field, but that does them no good if they are incapacitated and unable to communicate their location to the dispatch operator," Trichler said.
Previously, the team carried a consumer-type GPS receiver, which required searchers to look at the GPS to determine their location and then manually radio the location to the dispatcher at certain intervals.
So he contacted Pryme Radio Products regarding the company's GPSMIC system, which integrates a remote speaker microphone with a GPS receiver and modem. The device is capable of sending data messages containing the user's location data over a voice radio channel. Reports can be sent at various programmed...