Best signalling equipment from the searchers point of view

[MacDuyver]

I have one. You need a canister for it.

Will it fit in a small pelican case?


I’m a huge believer in PLBs, and am looking at one, particularly for some of the spots I like to drift dive.

When I was a wee soldier, I was in an advanced reconnaissance course. We were all ghillied up in a giant bush overlooking one of the objectives. One of the guys on my recon team was messing around with one of the radios (there’s ALOT of idle quiet time in recon), and found a feature in a menu entitled “Beacon.” Not sure what it was he toggled it a couple times. 20 or 30 minutes later, a helicopter from the sheriff’s department was circling above my team looking for us.

Needless to say the cadre did not think that us successfully hiding from a helicopter was as awesome as we did. I think we got thrashed more that night than I did in the rest of my career combined.

 

[Waterwulf]

I dove with a club out of North Florida back in the early 70's that was comprised mostly of Special Forces soldiers from assorted military branches. The Para-Rescue guys from the Air Force "liberated" really bright finger sized flares from someplace on base. They were as big as your finger so we called them Finger Flares. They smoked some too but it was mostly just brightness. You could NOT hold them in your hands because they got way to hot but they had a slit in the side for you to stick a knife in and hold it that way. I used one once to alert the boat to our location and it worked as advertised. I have never seen anything like them in the civilian market. I've often wondered if those Special Forces Yahoos were really handing out bomb fuses instead of flares!