Sunday 22 February 2015

Avalanche Transceiver Training



Avalanche Transceiver Training and Companion Recovery Training

Cost is £25.  Group Size is maximum of 8. Best if you have your own kit as that is what you need to practise with. Training contact time is 2.5 hours. Loan kit from Ortovox and ARVA is available on request.

We use Glencoe's excellent beacon training park and do search and recovery scenarios on ski, so at times it’s fairly mobile training. The thrust of the training is in the context of avalanche avoidance with these search and recovery tools being required when decisions and planning have gone awry.

Meet at 11am at the Beacon park next to the lowest “T” Bar below the plateaux CafĂ©


·                     Avalanche Forecast 101: 
Interpretation of the avalanche risk

The context. When you make a poor decision! >

·                     Beacon Searching 101: 
Phases of a search, search patterns, signal spikes, antenna orientation and smart antenna technology, Searching strategies, mark/flag pitfalls and problems

·                     Probing 101: 
Probing during pinpoint and deep burials

·                     Digging 101: 
Strategic shoveling and conveyor shoveling

·                     Victim recovery: 
Basic first aid for the victim

Tuesday 17 February 2015

Ortovox S1+ Transceiver


I have been very impressed by the Ortovox S1+ this season during training.  It's more like a flip lid mobile phone and quite different form other transceivers. Unlike most transceivers that lock you on a flux line for a longish period, the S1+ seems to work out the shortest distance across the flux lines and jumps you across in a straight line to the victim.  So you just walk straight to the victim following a line on the display.  It's very fast and handles signal spikes extremely well in deep burial scenarios.

If you walk past the victim it puts you the searcher icon behind a line.

I also like the fact that you can see the position of other buried victims relative to you the searcher and their distance away on the display screen. Marking seems very good indeed and the processor monitors the buried beacons pulse rates and will not let you mark if it senses signal overlap and displays a warning hand and a "55" . This has the best mark feature I have come across. Having said that I strongly believe that every one should know the basic search patterns of searching in series or parallel and micro grid before learning or relying on the mark feature.

More details on here Ortovox S1+ Information

I think this a is a bit of a star buy and a damn good avalanche transceiver for a professional or MRT's