Hello team!

My mum does a lot of walking out with the dog in the dales and lakes solo, I’ve heard about one of those emergency/summon help type gps things, I think it might be quite a good idea as there’s not a lot of mobile coverage and it’s easy enough to break an ankle, especially in the winter. Does anyone have any suggestions of suitable products?

Thanks in advance!

Anthony

I have used PLB’s – personal locator beacons – when sailing and these are quite common now and reasonably pric d. You log your data with a special registery this would incoude contact info for you and next of kin and any medical info. Thry work via satelitle signal. You would only use them in a real emergency and when you have no mobile signal to call mou tain rescueor the police for example

There are two mIn tupes 406mhz and GPS. The GPS sends you exact position and the 406 ate cheaper but tKe as much as 2-3 hours to traingulate a teasonably accurate position although emergency services are notified quickly. The GPS are more expensive

McMurdo PLB with GPS is the one I had about £190

You essentially have two types of products to consider:

– a personal locator beacon (PLB) originally designed for the marine environment. [Beware cheap old tech on eBay – you need one which works at 406 MHz (not just 121.5 MHz]. Will cost in the region of £200. Essentially single use device. Battery life about 5yrs and not user replaceable. Has to be registered with Ofcom/Coastguard (free online). Now legal for use on land in the UK. Beware though that the response is quite likely to involve a helicopter and before they launch they’ll try to contact the registered owner etc – so it can easily be a couple of hours before help arrives on scene. Will only be of use if she is conscious and able to reach the device to press the red button.

– a SPOT type tracker (other brands may exist by Spot are best known). This can be configured in various modes, and uses satphone technology to send text messages. It is possible to it to periodically update position so you know where she is even if she hasn’t pressed the distress button. Also possible to send an “OK” message – so if she found herself delayed somewhere without a problem she can tell you to calm down! The downside is they have a significant annual fee.

Personally though, I think you are being paranoid, people used to walk their dogs alone long before the invention of the mobile phone. She’ll be closer to help now than ever in the past. Does SHE feel vulnerable? Otherwise she probably won’t take it anyway.

I only know about these from the other end, but we have had a couple of calls over the last few years from a nice chap in America somewhere letting us know that someone has activated their beacon and this is exactly where they are. This was Spot. So they work!

Just as an aside, in case you don’t know, mobile phones can make emergency calls on any network even if the phone is showing no signal on your network.

Doesn’t help if there’s no coverage on any network, but if there’s a little bit of coverage from one of them it will work.

The being able to call the emergency services when you’ve no signal is a myth (you might get through, but you can still be cut off)! That’s why you can now register to contact them by text, as they’re more reliable.

There’s also a new phone app called Uepaa!, which works like a Spot.

Rather more cheaply and something you could do tomorrow is buy her a whistle. Its easy to use a zip pull on a jacket and rather more relable.

d45yth – Member
The being able to call the emergency services when you’ve no signal is a myth (you might get through, but you can still be cut off)!

I’m not talking about being able to call with no signal at all, just with no signal to your subscribed network but another being available.

e.g. You may be on Orange and have no signal and no bars are shown, but if there’s another signal, say O2, then it will lock onto that and only allow emergency calls.

It’s an emergency roaming facility basically.

http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/news/connecting-citizens/

As you say though, if there’s no signal at all, from any network, then it’s impossible to call anything.

Some phones will display “Emergency calls only” or similar in this situation. Some don’t.

The text option is helpful, though no guarantee the message will get through and emergency services can’t so easily find your location unless you mention it in the text.

Triangulation is pretty useless in more remote areas as the masts are so few and far between. We can find out which mast you are closest to, but it’s not as useful as you might think.

That’s reassuring!

thegreatape – Member
Triangulation is pretty useless in more remote areas as the masts are so few and far between. We can find out which mast you are closest to, but it’s not as useful as you might think.

Indeed. Same goes for phones that have GPS turned off or no GPS lock acquired, and you go into a map app to find your location. It will fall back to cell location which could be miles away. Happened to me when about to read out our location to emergency services only to realise the phone hadn’t locked onto GPS and the location was way off.

Once our teuchter call takers have deciphered the letter from America 🙂

There’s also a new phone app called Uepaa!, which works like a Spot.

Well, actually it works nothing like a Spot!

It does have an interesting feature using “accident detection” but I suspect that could quickly generate so many false alarms as to be useless. It relies on the user being aware of the risk of it triggering which might work for very sensible swiss folk who made it but less diligent people will dump their pack (with phone) whilst going to take a photo, have a leak, etc, get distracted and trigger an alert. A phone in the bottom of your pack on a windy day might even be inaudible when you are say 5m from it having lunch at the cairn.

The “works beyond the network range” is somewhat misleading. It appears it creates a pseudo-cellular network of Uepaa users and then uses one of these which is “in range” to relay the data back to the internet. For this to work at all requires a critical mass of Uepaa users. I suspect that it also has to do it via something like peer-to-peer wifi connections so you are looking at perhaps a hundred metres at best not the sort of distance that might be required. Spot uses sat phone signal so if it can see the sky it will work.

Hi everyone
Thanks for your thoughts!

Whilst perhaps paranoid, it is something my mum has mentioned as a confidence thing, she is now 60+ and more aware of mortality etc than she has been previously, so if this acts as a sort of confidence prop then as far as I’m concerned crack on. I’d rather buy this and help mum keep active and enjoying the outdoors than not.

Where we are there is limited reception and in reality no network coverage of any kind over s significant portion of the area, I know this from guiding round it so the phone type solutions are not applicable as there is no signal of any kind to pick up in most places and triangulation would most definitely be an issue due to the mast locations.

The spot one seems very good, I will investigate. Thanks again for everyone’s thoughts!

Sorry…mis read.Thought it said emergency bacon device.Got all excited 😳

Rorschach – Member
Sorry…mis read.Thought it said emergency bacon device.Got all excited

I did think the same at first 😀

Meeeeeeeehhhh!

Flashing red?!!