Good Friends Find Man Missing 3 Days After Motorcycle Crash

[dduelin]

This young man is extremely lucky. His friends found him still alive 3 days after crashing his bike and going down into a wooded ravine. Location sharing could have helped rescuers find him much faster.

If you are riding alone and don't carry a dedicated location sharing device like a Spot Tracker consider an app or setting on your phone that shares your location with family or a trusted friend. Phone apps only work inside of cell phone coverage but even off the grid your last cell tower ping could give clues as to the route your took from there. SPOTs and other low earth satellite based geo locators will work when phone coverage is lost.

https://www.kcra.com/article/missing-motorcyclist-found-alive-days-after-crash/45608033

 

[the Ferret]

This young man is extremely lucky. His friends found him still alive 3 days after crashing his bike and going down into a wooded ravine. Location sharing could have helped rescuers find him much faster.

If you are riding alone and don't carry a dedicated location sharing device like a Spot Tracker consider an app or setting on your phone that shares your location with family or a trusted friend. Phone apps only work inside of cell phone coverage but even off the grid your last cell tower ping could give clues as to the route your took from there. SPOTs and other low earth satellite based geo locators will work when phone coverage is lost.

https://www.kcra.com/article/missing-motorcyclist-found-alive-days-after-crash/45608033

Yea, I use the " Find My" app on my phone linked to my wife's and son's phones to keep track of me. They can check their phones anytime and see exactly where I am, which direction I'm headed and whether I am moving or not. Great peace of mind.

Years ago, I had a gen 1 Spot Tracker, but one day after a ride I walked into my house and my wife said "oh good you're home. I have been worried sick, your Spot Tracker says you are in Indiana and hadn't moved in hours. I was afraid you had run off the road and crashed. I was about to call the Indiana Highway Patrol and have them start looking for you".

 

[dduelin]

Yea, I use the " Find My" app on my phone linked to my wife's and son's phones to keep track of me. They can check their phones anytime and see exactly where I am, which direction I'm headed and whether I am moving or not. Great peace of mind.

Years ago, I had a gen 1 Spot Tracker, but one day after a ride I walked into my house and my wife said "oh good you're home. I have been worried sick, your Spot Tracker says you are in Indiana and hadn't moved in hours. I was afraid you had run off the road and crashed. I was about to call the Indiana Highway Patrol and have them start looking for you".

Years ago I got sick from eating a hamburger with bacteria or something in it but I didn’t give up hamburgers.

I was at a rally in MO 13 years ago and a small group of us was tearing up Push Mountain Rd. No cell service up there. One of us crashed and myself and another rider didn’t know and kept going up to the top. When we realized something had happened and got back down aways a local first responder stopped us and said Life Flight was in the road around the curve loading up our friend. He had a Spot in his tank bag and someone pushed SOS and 20 minutes later he was in the copter on his way to a trauma center 100 miles away.

 

[the Ferret]

Your friend was indeed fortunate.

There are any number of reports on mc forums of issues with Spot Trackers

Spot Tracker Does Not Work

I purchased a Gen3 Spot Tracker a few weeks ago and the thing has been totally unreliable. It tracked a couple of rides partially. Losing signal into...

www.advrider.com

Disappointed in Spot | General

I recently bought a Spot Generation 1 tracker for this weekends Curt Gran SS1K so my wife and kids could track me while I was riding. I did the whole sign up and activation process and even decided to pay for the tracking and not just the "I'm ok" messages. I tried the unit out a few times...

www.st-owners.com

Yes, a phone needs cell service, but these days cell coverage is pretty good, maybe a little sketchy in places.

I guess all of the systems have their plusses and minuses

I got rid of mine because I could not see spending a couple hundred bucks per year on a subscription only to have a "tracking service" lose me

Ya spends your money, ya take your chances

I got sick eating from a Frishes' restaurant breakfast bar 20 years ago. I've not eaten from once since lol

 

[dduelin]

I have noticed a few times where my Spot tracker map would skip over a ping or two 10 minutes apart. Pretty amazing given my use over 15 years of tracking rides and trips.

A lot of SAR/SAT reliability has to do with how the user orients the device. Asking people to follow best practice suggestions goes only so far. Spot claims about 10,000 rescues linked to their devices.

I paraphrase Wayne Gretsky “You miss 100% of the locations not sent.” I think a few missed pings is worth the chance of saving my life for $13 a month over a year. If I’m not mistaken Spot has plans now that allow “sleeping” the tracker during the times when it’s not needed.

 

[MZ5]

We ran SPOT trackers for all our 'field' personnel (remote survey and similar work). I use the past tense only because I'm not involved with that group any more. IDK what they do now.

Those trackers were radically superior to all cellular systems, and also had better coverage than our high-power VHF and UHF 2-way radios (with a repeater network, too) for emergency or other rescue situations.

I don't claim no difficulties, no unexpected operations, or the like. However, as a comparison to any and every cellular system, it's not even remotely close. Satellite trackers are flat-out superior, by orders of magnitude.

If one considers that people are accustomed to not having cellular service, particularly in even somewhat remote (or just not-urban) areas, then one quickly realizes that coverage failures for cellular are generally just not reported. So, while finding claims of a satellite-based tracker miss or failure on the internet may be worth considering, it's not in any way a comparable thing to the _lack_ of reports of cellular coverage failures.

 

[the Ferret]

Yea, if I was trekking in the Amazon rain forest or climbing in the Himalayas or hiking the Appalachian trail, I'd probably spring for a tracker of some sort. Riding around the US road system I'm ok with my cellular app, something actually suggested in post #1 in lieu of using a spot tracker.

 

[MZ5]

On my thousand-mile loop through AZ & NM a couple weekends ago, I lost cellular service for the large majority of the twisty bits, which also happened to be where all the rock walls and drop-offs into ravines were. I picked up service again once out of that terrain, so I suppose that, if I had crashed, so long as I had crawled out of the canyon and walked a few to several dozen miles to an intersection or ranch entrance, I could have then called for a Life Flight extraction.
(-:

I don't want to come across as snippy. That's why I put the smiley after that hopefully-clearly-satirical last sentence. Everyone has to choose their own tradeoffs.

 

[dduelin]

We ran SPOT trackers for all our 'field' personnel (remote survey and similar work). I use the past tense only because I'm not involved with that group any more. IDK what they do now.

Those trackers were radically superior to all cellular systems, and also had better coverage than our high-power VHF and UHF 2-way radios (with a repeater network, too) for emergency or other rescue situations.

I don't claim no difficulties, no unexpected operations, or the like. However, as a comparison to any and every cellular system, it's not even remotely close. Satellite trackers are flat-out superior, by orders of magnitude.

If one considers that people are accustomed to not having cellular service, particularly in even somewhat remote (or just not-urban) areas, then one quickly realizes that coverage failures for cellular are generally just not reported. So, while finding claims of a satellite-based tracker miss or failure on the internet may be worth considering, it's not in any way a comparable thing to the _lack_ of reports of cellular coverage failures.

The man in the article was riding in a rural community in a county of half a million bordered by I-75 and I-40. I live in a metropolitan area of over a million residents and can get into areas of no service or sketchy service just 30 miles from home and I ride these roads all the time. Learning this I have reconsidered my past use of the Spot gps tracker only for longer rides out of my day ride radius.

 

[the Ferret]

Interesting. My son just returned yesterday from a trip in that exact same area.. We could tell on our phone app when he was in Knoxville on I- 75, when he was on I-40 when he was in the Smoky Mts National Park in Gatlinburg, when he was on the BRP, even when he was in a Comfort Inn in Pigeon Forge.

Perhaps this fellow would have been found days sooner had he at least had the phone app and shared it with someone.

Beats having nothing, and it's free for the using if you have a smart phone.

 

[dduelin]

Interesting. My son just returned yesterday from a trip in that exact same area.. We could tell on our phone app when he was in Knoxville on I- 75, when he was on I-40 when he was in the Smoky Mts National Park in Gatlinburg, when he was on the BRP, even when he was in a Comfort Inn in Pigeon Forge.

Perhaps this fellow would have been found days sooner had he at least had the phone app and shared it with someone.

Beats having nothing, and it's free for the using if you have a smart phone.

Maybe the guy doesn't have a phone, a smart phone or the phone lost connectivity down in the ravine where he ended up. I agree it's not likely to lose signal when riding on the interstate. Last week I was out of service many times on the BRP and nearby roads. Verizon is my carrier.

Time to move on.