The recent introduction of the "TracMe Personal Locator Beacon" is causing confusion among consumers. If you are thinking of buying one to serve as your distress beacon...DON'T!

TracMe is NOT a 406 MHz Personal Locator Beacon.

TracMe is not a distress beacon at all. TracMe does not notify authorities you are in distress or provide location information.

TracMe is not suitable for use on backcountry adventures, in aviation or boating or for similar situations where distress alerting may be critical.

Doug Ritter examines the issues involved and explains why this misleading name could end up killing people. Doug reviews the critical differences between a real 406 MHz PLB and this homing beacon. TracMe may well have a place in the effort to save lives, but read Doug's commentary and you decide if TracMe is doing the right thing by calling their device a PLB:

http://www.equipped.org/blog/?p=65

If you feel strongly about this issue after reading the article, you might want to let the TracMe CEO know how you feel. An email link is provided at the end of the article.

Please help spread this around the web; help to get the word out and save lives.

Wow, at $150 that device seems over priced even.

Def. something everyone should be aware of!!

So they are esentially saleing a less powerful frs radio that has a chip that repeats the same message over and over in hope someone will hear it, I'd rather have the radio that way I could talk to someone and tell them where I am or at least be able to describe my surroundings. Maybe someone should warn them that karma can bite them in the rear for marketing this thing.

Yeah, the moniker "Personal Distress Beacon" would also be an accurate general description (as would "Personal Piece of Junk", IMHO). It is my belief that they are using the PLB name intentionally, and trying to take advantage of the PLB's high price to appear like a low-cost alternative.

To be fair, there are many instances where a simple homing beacon might be appropriate and far better than nothing at all. It may well be a useful tool for the right circumstances and persons.

For a comm radio to be useful, you have to know where you are, so in most cases you also need GPS or some other means of identifying your location. In many situations the description of your surroundings could be useless. "I'm in a forest with a lot of trees, can't see anything but trees."

You could, theoretically, outfit a scout troop or young children with this device and perhaps we'd lose less of both if they could be more easily found. However, then there's the price issue. At less than $50 it would be easier to make a case for it. But, In any case, that's a totally separate consideration from the naming issue. I'll be addressing that in the full evaluation

Judging from what I read on their website and my experience with ELT's, DFing one of these on the ground with the equipment they describe would be a very slow process. And if you're close enough to be in range, you're probably standing on the person you're looking for.

Perhaps they should call it a BLB - "Body Locator Beacon"

Donate the $150 to your local SAR team to help support their air-scent search dogs. Its a much better investment. Both methods require someone to know you're missing and both need to get pretty close to you before they start working. But the dog will find you faster and you don't have to carry or activate a beacon.

However, also to be fair, don't current (actual) PLBs come with a homing beacon? Isn't that what the 121.5 MHz portion of their signal is supposed to be? It allows Search and Rescue personnel to home in on the distressed person(s) location using equipment they already have, as opposed to using separate, proprietary, and probably expensive direction finding equipment.

Certainly not trying to butt heads with you, but I don't feel like there's any obligation to "be fair" to TracMe. Their product is hokey at best, and could cost people their lives. If an FRS homing beacon were feasible and practical, I would think that it would be built into FRS radios.

Granted, I understand your point that it could prove useful in certain circumstances. However, those circumstances are outside official Search and Rescue operations in my opinion. Unfortunately, that is not the demographic that TracMe seems to be marketing to.

The difficulty with that proposition is that a real PLB is 3 to 5 times the cost and nearly 7 times the weight. You certainly aren't going to hand your 6-year old a PLB (I would hope).

I won't argue that this approach has some significant issues, which I'll review in depth in my evaluation of the device, but it may well have its place.



You may have no such obligation. I do.



The device, per se, is not the problem. The problem is what they are calling it. That's what's more likely to cost lives.



I don't think that one follows the other. Lots of things that seem very obvious after the fact lie right under our noses for years, sometimes decades, before someone gets a why-didn't-I-think-of-that bright idea. In any case, if your FRS radio is working, you'd likely try calling someone. In fact,there is a movement to make Channel 1 a common distress frequency, but it's been slow to gain traction. But that's really beside the point.

Conceptually, TracMe has some merit, IMHO. Not without significant obstacles and problems, mind you. Whether they have approached it the best way is open to debate. Whether the pricing is reasonable is another question as well. Whether it will ever take off and gain enough market to make it viable is yet another question. It truly is as good an example of the chicken or egg problem you're likely to see anytime soon.

Thank you for elaborating and responding to my comments. I look forward to your full evaluation in the future. Hopefully it'll shed much more light on TracMe's good and bad points.

doug,

fyi, in your blog, at the bottom, the link to 'acr electronics' does not work - the url the link supplies has two "e"s, as in acreelectronics vs acrelectronics. fine point, but it makes a difference.

keep up your work, i appreciate the time and effort you expend.

bsmith