A team at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Munich, Germany has developed a digital avalanche rescue dog. It's not a canine, but it does have a nose for saving lives. It's an avalanche beacon made to work on cell phones. The thinking is that not everyone carries an avalanche beacon, but everyone carries a cell phone.
The researchers designed the beacon to work with the new geolocation satellite system called Galileo, which is being built by the European Union and the European Space Agency, and should be up and running by 2010. In addition to the basic service being offered for free, Galileo is supposed to be more precise than the United States' GPS system and will provide better positioning services at higher latitudes. This is why the back country snow sport enthusiasts should take heed.
The Fraunhofer researchers added a couple of components to an existing avalanche rescue navigator: a cellphone location function and software that calculates the position of the buried victim on the basis of local measurements.
A separate algorithm in a receiver being used by potential rescue personnel uses the field strength of the transmitted transmitted to pinpoint its source and therefore the buried victim.
Precision is extremely important in these emergency situations, because a victim may have no more than 30 minutes to live.
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