Who carries a EPIRB/PLB and what's a good one for under dense canopies?

[KiwiBro]

I'm going bush in a remote area and wonder if a beacon is a good idea and if so, what's a good one to get? Cell phone coverage is not the best.
I was told some beacons struggle to get a signal out through dense canopies. I don't know if this is true.

Any help would be great, thanks.

 

[Billy_Bob]

I know the opposite is true, my GPS will not receive in dense canopies.

And I have been stuck out in the middle of nowhere where my cell phone did not work and no one responded to any channel on the CB. So I think an EPRIB type thing would be an excellent idea! In my area you can usually find a clearing within walking distance.

Where do you get these? How much?

 

[RPM]

I use a SPOT becon SPOT SATELLITE MESSENGER :: HOME PAGE when I am working alone and I don't have reliable radio communication....my clients require me to carry one b/c their own employes are required to. Its simple and works fairly well as a check in. I use it in closed canopy stands all the time and would say it sends the message quickly 85% of the time. The unit itself is fairly cheap ($99 CAN) + $99 annual fee.....the annual fee thing sucks.

As with any GPS device it does not work if there are no satilites visible to the unit, whether they are physically not in the sky above you at the time you need it or the device is hidden behind something (mountain / deep valley - north facing areas are bad around here for that). Most importantly it is not a back up for doing stupid things!

 

[slowp]

Trimble GPS guys told us that it is not the tree canopy. It is the bole/trunk. I was working in N. CA and we had a place that was extremely hard to get readings in. It is where we would take the GPS salesmen and their devices out for testing. The area was fairly flat, with lots of big tall trees.

You can get good readings on hillsides, but flat big treed ground is tougher. That's what we found out.

 

[madhatte]

You can get good readings on hillsides, but flat big treed ground is tougher. That's what we found out.

Offsets are your friends. Get a reading where you can, then offset by what you have to. I remember one contract in the mid-90's where we couldn't get a signal so we ran the antenna up a 15-m telescoping fiberglass line pole. The weight of the coax cable and the antenna together up there made the pole bow over pretty good, so what we'd do was swing it through an arc. Starting at one side, we'd collect points until it hit about the same position on the other side of the arc... turn 45 degrees, repeat a few times. Eventually we'd have a cloud of points roughly describing a location 15 meters above ground level. In post-processing, we'd average the location data and then subtract the fifteen meters. That's give us about 1-meter resolution, which was pretty rockin' back in the day, especially under a canopy.

 

[k5alive]

is that what we call '' afro engineering'' but in all seriousness thats a good idea

 

[madhatte]

We call it "making do with what we have". Contract specifies data, but leaves a bit of wiggle room for methodology.