Transceivers

A friend of mine has asked for some advice on avalanche trancievers.

At the beginning of the season, I bought a couple of BCA Tracker DTS units. Having practiced with them a bit find them very easy to use.

I notice that the Tracker 2 will be out for next season and so my reccomendation was going to be to get the new version. However, I can also see good reviews of the Ortovox S1.

With the S1, I like the idea of being able to see signals visualy on the LCD screen, however the fact that it is an LCD display also worries me.

I had an old mobile with a similar looking LCD. The LCD screen stopped working all together below about -10C and I was worried about the same thing happening to the S1.

Has anyone had experience of using this unit in low temperatures?

The Tracker has a very rugged construction, which I like. However it is quite bulky as a result and I was wondering how rugged is the construction of the S1?

What are the pros and cons of both units? Does anybody have a strong opinion either way?

PS - Both the classic tracker and S1 have minimum operating temps of -20C based on the technical data taken from the user manuals.

So far there's not enough tracker 2 units out there to get good, informed reviews. It will be a 3 antenna unit like the S1 and Pulse, but likewise the S1 hasn't been around long enough to get good reviews and hasn't made much impact in professional use.

Right now, the best and most proven three antenna unit is the Pulse. It wins over the tracker 1 for multiple burials but this is a contentious area and the frequency of multiple burials is hotly debated, the figures are pretty hard to analyse.

If I could have any transceiver, I would have either a tracker 1 or a pulse right now and in fact, we have both pulses and trackers currently along with F1's

Thanks ise.

I'm really curious about the S1. It looks like a great idea.

It does look interesting but so far I don't know anyone who's got one and it's the only device on the market that I've never personally used. On the one hand I''d say none of the manufacturers are producing poor kit but then I think back to the Ortovox X1 which had some problems. When we just bought some Pulses I didn't seriously consider S1's at all.

sounds like somebody knows a lot about trancievers.. i've got an Pieps any information bout the diffrence and whats better?

Trixi wrote:sounds like somebody knows a lot about trancievers.. i've got an Pieps any information bout the diffrence and whats better?

which sort of pieps is that? there's been several models. The newest is the DSP with an LCD screen and there's a freeride model which is an odd little thing.

I wouldn't get caught up in what transceiver is better than another. There's only one main distinction you can make, and that's how many antenna the transceiver has and if it's digital or not.

Traditionally they had a single antenna and the basic operation was to tell you how strong the signal was using lights and sound, the Ortovox F1 was probably the most popular model but there were others. It tends to be that these have the greatest range., as much as 80m for reception in the case of the F1 in favorable conditions. These were analogue devices.

There were a couple of digital single antenna devices, in this context digital means instead of displaying purely signal strength some processing goes on and you get direction indication.

Next along were devices with two antennas, this allowed some clever signal processing so they have an LCD or LED screen given direction and distance readings. The best known was probably the BCA Tracker DTS.

Now we have three antenna models and yet more clever signal processing. So something like a Mammut Pulse is able to distinguish between multiple signals for multiple burials and has some other clever tricks like sending biometric data indicating when the transmitting device stopped moving and if there's life signs.

Along with adding antenna the evolution has been to use faster chips to do the processing, some users have found older models hard to use as there's processing lags from time to time. That's generally exacerbated by them waving the transceiver around like they're on Star Trek though.

Various tests show predictable results, more modern transceivers are very slightly quicker in most users hands, an experienced user of the old F1 can generally beat even newer devices though. That's probably for two reasons, first, the F1 has around double the range so you don't need to box search for first signal and second, they've been around a long time and some people have 20 odd years experience with them. The tests also show some devices are slightly quicker than another but the differences aren't very significant. Other differences centre around multiple burials which is a contentious issue, but three antenna devices tend to do better here and some, like the Pulse, have special features.

Personally, we have Ortovox F1's, DTS Trackers and Mammut Pulses, I tend to mostly use the Pulse personally day to day.