This may be of interest to a few, Patterdale Mountain Rescue will today be testing an unmanned drone that will be used to to assist in the search for missing walkers. The difference here is that photos of the search area will be made available to registered users to tag anything of interest (i.e. a casualty), therefore being many more pairs of eyes reviewing images that a single operator could possibly do on his / her own.
More details are on the BBC news website below, which includes a link if you wish to sign up to assist in this test.
In reply to G0VOF:
There will shortly be pictures of The Cloud SP015 on my website thanks to Russ M6RGF who recently experienced a drone attack up there.
A very interesting article…I have been researching these drones over the last 2 weeks since my encounter…fascinating device with some great potential…its positioning technology is quite astounding.
I wonder if in the future climbers could wear a transmitting device that could communicate with the drone, making it possible to find somebody in the dark or the snow…I know there is a Breitling watch that has this facility.
Have sent all my info and photos to Tom M1EYP as he writes a better story plus
my computer skills are very basic and I wouldnt know where to start building a website of my own.
Must admit considering the drone was nearly out of view the images the guys sent me are amazing.
It’s quite astonishing what a high video quality these kind of unmanned vehicles are able to produce.
Unfortunately, the presented video isn’t from a SOTA activation, hi.
It’s just a promotional film from a company, to which I’m not affiliated in any way.
I guess it’s about time to launch a new AP-association
I wonder if in the future climbers could wear a transmitting device
that could communicate with the drone, making it possible to find
somebody in the dark or the snow…
Russ
Well you can already carry a PLB which, with built in GPS, will pin point you pretty accurately.
Then of course there’s APRS and any number of Smartphone apps doing the same job.
Spot delivers tracking where terrestrial signals fail and are now quite affordable with the basic yearly package.
Hello Mark,
I participated in the trial. It meant reading the mission brief/the target to be found. I trawled through my set of images but found the images at too low a resolution and sometimes they were blurred. Also there was no indication of scaling or the ability to zoom on the images. I have fed this all this back to the project. I have spoken with three other people who also joined in and they found the same but it was a trial so bound to improve and certainly a good use of drones.
Bye for now
Mike G6TUH
The problem with SPOT in the UK, especially GM, is that the coverage at our latitudes was a bit ropey with quite long periods between effective comms windows. That might have changed if they launched a few more sats but it was a major downer when I looked at it approx 18months back.
I was working in the control tower at Carlisle Airport whilst these trials were taking place and, of course, we were aware, as it was flagged up as a potential hazard to aviation in the area. Not a problem, the drone was at a much lower altitude than any local general aviation.
It’s certainly an interesting development for organisations such as mountain rescue and so long as they stay below 500ft AGL then I’m all for it. Some other drone technology operates at much higher altitudes and they ARE a bit of a worry to us aviators!
So, when is the MT going to obtain one of these drones to check up on the claims of rogue SOTA activators? If one, or at least its data, had been available a few years ago, it may have confirmed a few long-held suspicions.
Then the next step is to arm it with RF-seeking weaponry which will terminate any operation found to be outside the AZ …
Interesting idea Brian. I have one of those helicopter things. It’s VERY substantial (i.e. not a toy) and I always wondered about hooking an antenna up to it.
Then again - I’ve also thought about a helium balloon to take my 160m antenna skyward. Looking on the bright side - It would be negative weight to haul up to a summit!
I have one of those helicopter things. It’s VERY substantial (i.e. not a toy) and I always wondered about hooking an antenna up to it.
Best use for a well controlled helicopter is carrying a line over a nearby tree (as high as possible) to then haul the end of the home qth antenna over it. Easier (and safer) than a catapault or bow and arrow - unfortunately took me nearly six months to learn to fly the wretched thing to risk it!
(Great fun though - transmitting on 13cm, so an amateur radio topic Mr Moderator sir!)
