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'Death By GPS' Increasing In America's Wilderness
An anonymous reader writes "Every year, more and more Americans are dying in deserts and wildernesses because they rely on their GPS units (and, to some degree, their cellphones) to always be accurate. The Sacramento Bee quotes Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan: 'It's what I'm beginning to call death by GPS ... People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.'"
No really. Talk about depressing. It's about a six-year old kid and his mom, the kid dies. That's sad enough, but they have to give you some horrible details and imagery that's incredibly depressing.
I'm gunna go run a hot bath and slit my wrists now. Or maybe make some toast.
... and then he'd pack it in for the day, take the camera crew out for a nice dinner at the nearest steakhouse, check into his hotel and be all fresh for the next day's shoot.
Bear is at best entertainment (think 'fear factor' outdoors), at worst a fraud. A real "survivorman" is Les Stroud, who packs in all his own gear and films everything himself, alone... and actually stays out in the wilderness for the duration.
A bigger problem over here in old blighty is articulated lorries getting stuck by driving down roads that are too narrow or otherwise unsuitable. One big problem in this case is it's virtually impossible to turn a lorry on a narrow road. So if the road starts looking bad the choices are to carry on and hope they don't get stuck, try to reverse out (very slow and likely to require a second person) or tow the lorry out.
In America, there are GPS maps created by commercial services for sale to the trucking industry. These maps include weight restrictions, width and height restrictions, truck routes, diesel fuel truck stops, tire and service centers, all kinds of information that is specific to the driving of big rigs. I would assume you have similar services available over there. But if your ordinary trucker thinks he can just drop a $99 Garmin on his dashboard and use it to drag a 30 tonne trailer to wherever he wants, well, that's almost as foolish as trying to cross two hundred miles of desert because there's a little blue line on the screen.
John
I'd hardly call James Kim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim) a "moron".
The guy went to Oberlin College, and worked as a reviewer for CNET. He and his family missed an exit while traveling through southern Oregon. Instead of turning around, they asked their GPS for an alternate route. It told them to take a rarely used road that had a lot of snow. Their car got stuck. After about a week, he decided to try to walk to a town that he thought was four miles away. He died of exposure.
He made a couple of bad decisions, and it cost him his life.
The Kims didn't use a GPS, they used a paper map.
You know there are specific Truck/Professional GPS units available? Off course they don't cost $50 but closer to $500 for the same 7" but the maps are specifically laid out for big rigs, hazmat and other restrictions to the roads that might come along on a cross-country drive. It seems to me that trucker probably wouldn't have been helped with a map either because he would've seen a shorter route on the map regardless.
The whole country (at least the US) is mapped and all restrictions on the roads (height, width, weight, curvature) are known by the government and private mapping companies. Those databases literally take up Terabytes and have to get condensed into usable information on a 4Gig data card, not something you can put in the simplest GPS units just yet.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You understand that getting stuck in a snowdrift doesn't require a lot of snow to be on the road... right?
Ground clearance on a lot of vehicles can be measured in inches. Skidding and getting stuck in a drift 6-12 inches deep is easy to do with front wheel drive. I've seen people skid off I-90 in northwestern Pennsylvania in snowy conditions, and get stuck in drifts while driving a hundred yards behind a snow plow / sand truck. I-90 is a major interstate, and the road was about as clear as it's going to get in snowy conditions.
The real danger would be that, on a seasonal road, it may be very difficult to find any assistance to get yourself hauled *out* of the snowbank.
No, Les had a sat phone, he was capable of calling for help and did at least twice. But in general you are right, whatever Bear does do the exact opposite whereas Les may actually give you some decent pointers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, more broadly, and more important:
If you're lost/stranded, never leave the protection of your car.
Please Remember What's First!
PRWF
Protection
Rescue
Water
Food
Importance is in order. Do not give up protection without a extremely high chance of rescue.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Les doesn't have that luxury; he can't even contact help. If he doesn't show up in the seven days, they go look for him.
Les isn't that crazy, he's stated several times that he does take a locater device with him but it's only used in an extreme emergency. However the rest of it is true. He doesn't have anyone with him and he does everything on his own - including the multi-angle and long-distance shots.
There have been quite a few "shock factor" things that Bear Grylls has done that will probably get you killed if you did them out in the wilderness. For example, that whole thing about putting urine up your rectum is a horrible idea. The amount of water you could absorb that way would be negligible and you risk perforating the mucosa of the rectal wall and/or introducing infection.
Perhaps Bear Grylls really does know something about survival techniques but he throws in so many crazy ideas that it's tough to separate what's sensible from what's radical. Les Stroud walks you through the concepts and presents you with solid ideas for survival that have the best chance for getting you out alive, even if they aren't flashy.
Sapere aude!
I don't know where you heard that, but it's not "apparent" at all. Sorry, but it's simply not true.
aGPS is only dependent on cell towers for the initial GPS lock, and only speeds up that lock from the traditional GPS approach by using approximate location data. aGPS without cell tower = GPS. The GPS radio itself is not dependent in any way on the cell radio.
When any GPS receiver first starts up, it needs to know what satellites to look for. Not all birds are visible from all locations. Traditional GPS just picks a handful of common and evenly-scattered satellite frequencies and starts listening until it gets its first lock. Then it starts listening for satellites that are known to be close to the one it found. When it has 3-4 of them, it has a good idea of where it is and can narrow down the rest and start giving you decent accuracy. This process takes time (in some old GPS units, several minutes).
On my old Magellan Meridian, it would actually ask you what state you were in at start-up to help narrow down the search, and accurately identifying your state could cut 1-2 minutes off start-up (without this initial hint, it could take up to 5 minutes to get a "first lock" even with a clear view of the sky). So that was an example of early "assisted GPS", where I was the "assist" mechanism.
What's even worse is when your GPS tries to remember where it was, and you've moved somewhere else while the GPS receiver was powered off. Once, on a trip from Maine to Texas, I powered down my Meridian in Maine before boarding the plane, then fired it up in Texas and it took nearly 10 minutes for the GPS to conclude that it needed to ask me approximately where it was. It kept trying to broaden the search for satellites but never widened the net enough to include a bird that's visible from Texas because it assumed I was in Maine. When I told it I was in Texas, it took less than 2 minutes to get an initial lock.
If you can figure out where you are very quickly, the GPS can skip that whole up-front search because it can send a quick ping to a local tower or two and figure out your location to within a few dozen miles in a matter of a few seconds. Knowing where you are that accurately means it can predict with really high confidence what satellites are in range, and start searching for them up front. So the "assisted" part pings towers, gets your rough location (which, by the way, Google Maps on the Blackberry and iPhone shows you while the GPS is still trying to get a lock), then feeds that information into the GPS as a "hint" to tell it what satellites to search for.
If you are outside cell range, the aGPS just becomes a plain old GPS. Still works just fine, just takes a little longer for that initial lock. About the same as it would if you had a non-assisted GPS, assuming the two units have similar antennas and similar processors, of course.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
A bigger problem over here in old blighty is articulated lorries getting stuck by driving down roads that are too narrow or otherwise unsuitable. One big problem in this case is it's virtually impossible to turn a lorry on a narrow road. So if the road starts looking bad the choices are to carry on and hope they don't get stuck, try to reverse out (very slow and likely to require a second person) or tow the lorry out.
In America, there are GPS maps created by commercial services for sale to the trucking industry. These maps include weight restrictions, width and height restrictions, truck routes, diesel fuel truck stops, tire and service centers, all kinds of information that is specific to the driving of big rigs. I would assume you have similar services available over there. But if your ordinary trucker thinks he can just drop a $99 Garmin on his dashboard and use it to drag a 30 tonne trailer to wherever he wants, well, that's almost as foolish as trying to cross two hundred miles of desert because there's a little blue line on the screen.
The same class of GPS map is sold in the UK; the problem is that they cost more than the cheap car GPS units. Taking Garmin as a sample manufacturer, the cheapest car unit they sell here is £99. The cheapest truck unit is £259. A trucker buying a GPS unit on his own dime because he's a bit unsure about how best to get to his destination, but isn't brave enough to ask the office to get the maps out is going to buy the £99 unit. And then he's going to foul up; if it wasn't such a problem for the rest of us, it'd just be funny.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
It can be tricky to see the depth of snow on a road. Uniform white snow breaks depth perception, especially in dusk/dawn light conditions (dim enough that vision is reduced, but light enough that your headlights aren't helpful.). I've driven in central Canadian winters for 8 years and it can still screw with you at times, especially on familiar roads, doubly so when the drifts weren't there yesterday.
It can also be tricky to tell where exactly the edge of the road is.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, our leader told us to ignore any advice you might have heard about finding your way back to civilization if you are lost. If somebody, somewhere, has some remote clue as to where you might be (and thinks to have someone search), you are 100% better off not going anywhere. You probably are not as lost as you think, and are likely not far from where you were trying to be. The best way for somebody to find you is for you not to go even farther away.
Yes, by moving you may, by dumb luck, blunder back to where you need to be, but you are far more likely to simply end up getting more lost and hard to find.
And never, ever, abandon your car if you are lost. It contains all sorts of useful resources and is rather larger (and easier to find) than you wandering about the woods alone, passed out under a tree. It contains a conveniently large tank of liquid firestarter, and if you carry a couple of basic tools, a large amount of nice insulation in the form of your seat cushions and carpeting. In the heat, the underside is perfectly good shade (if a little cramped.)
I'd like to stress out that as a western European tourist, I didn't have the notion that there could be lethal wilderness in a developed country the first time I went to US. Of course now I understand the scale of it but please keep in mind that the idea you can get stuck somewhere more than a day of walk from a town is uncommon for some foreigners.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.