Tragic avalanche news

This is common sense and practice but I thought I would mention it. Keep your transeiver inside your insulating layers to keep it toasty, the batteries will stay warm for some time when you bring it out to search. I also keep my cell phone in my pant pocket next to my thigh for the same reason.

Yes, in addition, the transceiver would be less likely to be ripped away from you in an avalanche if it's on the innermost layer.

In the context of this incident, searching for pings from a beacon nearly a week later, we were not expecting any body heat to still be keeping the beacon toasty.

Regarding Recco and the spy plane stuff:

There was a Recco detector on a ground unit and on a helicopter. I believe the helicopter also had some sort of avy transceiver, dunno if it was extra sensitive.

There were no planes flying over on Saturday, though SAR often receives assistance from Whidbey, usually in the form of helicopters. I have no idea if we could get assistance from an EP-3E or if it could be useful... I'd have to ask.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to use anything other than alkalines in your beacon, unless the manufacturer gives the OK. There was an issue with BCA Trackers a few years ago where the use of non-alkalines would cause the beacon to spontaneously shut off! Also, AFAIK the battery charge gauges on all the newer units only work with alkalines.

In response to Gary's inquest, and because I've deemed it time to change my beacon batteries, I decided to try tossing my beacon in the freezer last night just to see what would happen.

It's a Pieps DSP (purchased last January, firmware v 2.8?) with Panasonic "PowerLine" AAA batteries. They're January's batteries, and have probably seen 27-30 full days of use. For perhaps 20 of those days, it merrily read 100% on the battery-o-meter. With new batteries at 10C, Pieps claims a lifetime of ~600 hr in transmit. At 0% and 10 C, Pieps claims a transmit life of 24+ hr. They claim -20C as their minimum operating temperature.

My freezer door keeps ice cream in a reasonable state, not impenetrable, not soft. These folks claim that the serving temperature of ice cream is -16 C (3 F). Since the freezer's made of metal, there's a chance that the beacon regulates its output power differently when its in the freezer than when its in the field.

At 11:28 pm last night, I put my room temperature beacon in the freezer door. It read 64% and blinked happily.
At 8:31 am the cold beacon read 15%, but merrily blinked.
At ~9:45 pm tonight, it read 0%, the LCD continued to flash as though it were transmitting, but the blinky LED did not. I suspect this is a power saving mode, but I have no second beacon with which to verify whether or not it was transmitting.
As I'm skiing tomorrow, the freezer experiment ended here. But, to see how it did post-warming up, I strapped on the harness. By 10:10, the LED was intermittently blinking. By 10:20, the battery-o-meter read 4%. At 10:30, it reads 10%. 10:45, 19%.

Recall that my freezer temperature's probably below 10F.

There's a little data. Conclude what you will.

I'm impressed with how well insulated the DSP seems to be. It's been cool, but not cold, to the touch since I removed it from the freezer. That suggests that the internals are warming slowly. If that's the case, one might hope that it'll cool slowly as well, buying a little more time.

Anyone have a beacon they can chunk in the snow outside their house and monitor once a day?