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Do helo's looking for lost people make calls for them on FRS and if so would it be on Ch 1 no tone or 9-11 (Ch. 9 tone 11)?

-thanks
-m

I wouldn't expect the helo to do that work.

We had a search where the family told us the missing person had FRS radios and we made contact with them to help figure out where they are.

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Mt Wave SAR member
Support Search & Rescue: Get Lost!
http://www.mwave.org

Most people don't carry FRS radios... When a Helo locates a lost subject, we lower a care package to them that has a VHF radio with a simplex frequency programmed into it so the Helo and the ground search crews can talk to them.

....we just have the helo pick them up and call it a day

_________________
Mt Wave SAR member
Support Search & Rescue: Get Lost!
http://www.mwave.org

Ill ask my SAR deputy at lunch today...

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"A well regulated breakfast, being necessary to the healthy start of the day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

My feeling is there ought to be a campaign to get hikers to haul a FRS with them, if lost. Seems an obvious solution to days of searching that so many teams do.

If we know somebody has one, and what frequency/tone they're using, we'll send a few out with teams to try to make contact with them, but given the typical range of those toys, I wouldn't call it reliable. Have seen it work once.

Range would be fine helo to ground.

I remember a local story (up north somewhere) where a person in distress made contact over a very significant distance to some kid, who relayed.

Elevation was key in this case.

Its unfortunate that some groups have attempted to standardize channel 1 with no tone as the "emergency" channel. The two obvious drawbacks of this is that more people use channel 1 for nonemergency chitchat purposes because most radios default to channel 1 out of the box and the other problem is that its a pain to monitor a popular channel with no tone selected as you will then have to listen to all the nonemergency nonsense regardless of what tone people are using. This really discourages monitoring. Last but not least, the "emergency" channel should be one of the first 7 channels (462.xxx) as most radios are hybrid FRS/GMRS which gives the user the option of running higher power in GMRS mode if necessary. Keep in mind that proper licensing is of least concern in a true emergency.

That being said, perhaps someone (us?) should start a drive for a sensible FRS/GMRS emergency channel that (a) is not channel 1, (b) uses a standard lower-numbered CTCSS tone, and (c) is channel 2,3,4,5,6, or 7.

From Mt Hood, IIRC.

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