The original post about this story here on ETS Forum that was posted some time back indicated that he was found by the helicopter usign the 121.5 MHz homing beacon. It doesn't sound like that is truely the case here. It sounds like it was more likely that they found him through his signaling.

If the SAR team had tuned into the 121.5MHz homing beacon they should have at least had a direction to head toward and maybe even triangulated his (the beacon's) position in fairly short time. In one of Doug's discussions he'd pointed out that many SAR teams either don't have the 121.5 MHz equipment or are not trained to properly home in on it.

There is also the posibility that along side the cliff the GPS was not able to lock onto sufficient satellites to get a GPS location. The location provided by the beacon might have been a Doppler location, which has an error of 12.5 miles or so. The victim would have known this by looking at the lights on his PLB - if the GPS LED was blinking green then he had sufficient signal for a GPS location - if after 20 minutes it was still blinking red, then he would have been relying on a Dopplier location.

The other lesson learned is that he should certainly have a had a signal mirror (though we're not sure of the sunlight available) and it would have been good to also have a nighttime signal devise, such as the Rescue Laser Flare.