By Greg Bartlett
Ski resorts are becoming increasingly popular with families of young children. Usually, a typical holiday like this involves the children going for lessons with the instructors resident on the resort while their parents go onto the bigger slopes to have a good day’s skiing. But, it is vital to keep track of the little ones’ whereabouts at all times. It not only promotes peace of mind for the parents, but also increases confidence in the young skiers to know that someone can monitor their location.
Global Positioning System, or GPS tracking systems, use signals sent by satellites to precisely calculate their position, and of course, the position of the item or person they are attached to. There are roughly between twenty-four and thirty-two satellites which are potentially available to assist in this positional location. Each of these satellites continually transmit signals to the Earth containing exact measurements of the time and their precise location among other things. A GPS system uses at least four of these signals to extrapolate geopositional information. Why four? Interestingly, if there was even a microdecimal mistake in one of these signals, then the information could be wrong by hundreds of miles. So four satellites are used to correct each other.
Recently in a popular ski resort it was reported that a young girl had gone missing for a number of hours. With daylight fast waning and the temperatures falling rapidly, all the day’s activities were halted while a major search was carried out. Fears were growing that the child had fallen down into a snow hole, or worse, injured an arm or a leg. Luckily, the resort was trialling the new GPS tracking devices through which instructors can track their students’ activities. If they stray over a certain distance away from the instructor, then an alarm sounds in a central monitoring office. Even more luckily, the young girl had been fitted with one of the devices. Not everyone was fitted with one that day, but she was.
There are two types of these devices: ones which track a person’s location in real-time and those which record the data into their own hardware to be downloaded later. Both of these types of devices were operational that day. The self-record types are issued to the older children. They can track their own progress and show off to their friends about how many runs they have done and how high they got. Even family at home can log in to see their activities.
The little girl was fitted with a real-time GPS monitoring device. It uses the satellite positioning to put a point on a map. This gives the location of the wearer at all times. Once this information had been obtained, it was a question of going out to that location and finding the girl. She had fallen and she was unconscious. If the search party had not been confident that she would be found there, then she would have been totally missed. Without a personal GPS tracker system in place, it is difficult to say what could have happened.
