A friend and colleague who skis in remote areas was telling me about recent advances in avalanche transceivers. These are handheld devices that can transmit a person's location if they have been buried by an avalanche.
They all transmit on the same wavelength. Each transmitter cycles through a succession of slow to fast beeps, so that a receiver can distinguish different transmitters all broadcasting on the same frequency by the pattern of beeps.
The long telescopic probe that is used to find victims under the snow now has an emitter on the end that can silence a transponder once a victim had been located by probe, so that other victim's signals can be more easily located.
Fascinating technology.
Avalanche transceivers - see the section on types of beacons to see how they are able to indicate the direction of multiple transmitters.
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