Need to Know: How to use a distress beacon

How to use a distress beacon

By Ruth McKie, DOC Digital

Channels Analyst

Keen tramper Ruth shares her experience activating a distress beacon

Tramping is one of my favourite things. Nothing beats the thrill of an empty weekend, great forecast and a map full of possibilities.I’ve done lots of tramping over the years to a range of places – Great Walks, day trips, remote backcountry huts through to off-track bush bashing and peak bagging. But until recently, I’ve never needed to activate a distress beacon, although I always make sure there’s at least one in the group.

I’m very aware, and I hope you as a reader are too, of how incredibly valuable distress beacons are – they’re lifesavers. I’m sure you’ve read news stories of searches going for days because they didn’t have a beacon or stories where it was a successful rescue because the beacon made things fast and easy.

I’ve read lots of stories about people activating their beacon but often it’s light on detail, just ‘we activated our beacon and the helicopter came’. Which left me with lots of unanswered questions, like how, what, why, when!?

I figured I can’t be the only one, so I’ve talked to experts and gathered the research. Here is my personal beacon story, as well as some key FAQ’s that will be next month’s issue of this magazine.

When I had to activate a beacon on a Great Walk

It was a calm bluebird morning; the last day of an amazing trip, and I was in my own world soaking in the waterfall views, waiting for the sun to hit it to get a nice photo.

I noticed a bit of activity going on off to the side of the track and my friends told me that there was someone who’d hurt themselves and someone was going to be activating their distress beacon. It was a busy Great Walk, and there were lots of trampers around (a fact which turned out to be both fortunate, and unfortunate).

I went over too in case I could help. A lady had badly hurt her leg.

Her partner had tried to bandage it up with a makeshift splint, but she was struggling to walk and the road end was still about two hours away.

She did not have a beacon, but someone else had offered to activate theirs for her. The different groups of trampers wanting to help had been discussing what to do. They’d decided that the best thing was to send someone down the track to a flat area on the map where a helicopter could land, and activate the beacon there.

The plan was the lady’s partner would slowly carry her down the track and someone else would carry their two packs down to where the beacon was being activated. This way the helicopter could land in a flat spot and the rescue team could bring a stretcher up the track to meet

Above: Ruth McKie holding her

beacon. Photo Lucy Holyoake

Above left: Sun hitting the waterfall creating a rainbow. Photo by Ruth McKie Above right: Ruth enjoying the lake reflections on a tramp. Photo by Lo Hughes Below left: Taking a group break to check on each other, layer up in the cold wind and adjust my boots.

Photo by Luke Sutton

the lady. I offered to take one of the packs and headed off to the flat spot as planned.

What we didn’t realise until later, was that the flat spot was about a 45minute walk from where the woman was injured. It was too painful and not practical for her to be carried that far. So, when the helicopter landed at the flat spot only to realise the injured person wasn’t there, but miles down the track, they had to take off again, and find the lady based on verbal descriptions of her location and then winch her off the track.

Long story short: after some confusion, the lady was safely rescued, her partner was reunited with their packs, and he walked out to the road to take the shuttle to go meet her at the hospital.

What I learned from this experience

While this story had a happy rescue ending, it was an important learning experience. On reflection, once the adrenaline rush faded, I realised the pack, patient, and the beacon all need to stay together.

In a crisis, when lots of people are trying to be helpful, all with different ideas, it can be easy to lose sight of this important factor. The patient needs their pack – they might need warm clothes, food or shelter if help can’t arrive quickly.

And the beacon needs to show the rescue team exactly where the injured person is – yes if you are near a clearing/flatter spot, then setting it off nearby could be better, but only if you’re sure it’s not too far away. It needs to stay as close as possible to the injured person, and then leave it to the rescue team to decide on the best way to get to you, as they have the tools and knowledge on how to do that safely.

Getting familiar with my own distress beacon

After this experience on my Great Walk trip, when I was packing my beacon for my next trip, I thought: wait do I still know how to activate this if it was to happen to me? It’s been so long since I got it, that I hadn’t taken it out of its protective bag and actually looked at it in ages.

I took it out and had a good look, remembering how the antenna unfolds and where the ‘go button’ is, and reassured myself that it would be very hard to accidentally set the button going. It was then that I noticed the test button.

Test your beacon

I realised I hadn’t tested the beacon since I got it! I looked up the instructions for my model to see what the recommended testing frequency is, and mine said once a year and no more than once a month. The less the better as it significantly drains the battery. I decided now was a good time to test it and I’ve put a calendar reminder in my phone to test it in one year’s time.

I learned a lot from this experience. It also made me go home and dive deeper into my many beacon questions.