Tommorrow is Mock Search Day

[jocoyn]

We do these a few times a year to field dog/handler teams getting them ready for the "real" thing.....and always good to just test in general. We normally get about 15 live searches in a year but this helps them work out the kinks and allows us to stick new folks in new roles (such as command).

Someone from another team is setting it up and no one on our team will have a cue other than the location of the command center.

My thing tomorrow will be to work some kinks out of the Astro units. We have the handheld on a radio mast but in rough terrain you still loose the signal so I am going to play with clearing them all before sending them out and uploading data directly from the collar to the handheld [we have 7 collars / 1 handheld]

Then I am going to work with some others to get them better at clearning their GPSs BEFORE they start and entering waypoints on start and finish so I can truncate their tracks before saving for import into Maptech. AND getting them to take their tracks into Mapsource, saving each track as a gpx file THEN putting in Matpech. A little more work on the front end.

Here is one hint. We never save the tracks on the GPS because our garmins strip the time and speed data from the tracklog when you do that. By uploading the active log and then clipping off irrelevant data,you have some more data so that you can associate a time with a given waypoint.

Grim is going to ride shotgun. You just never know if we have a live or dead victim or both.

Did that make any sense. All this and maybe I will get to work my own dog for 20 minutes or so after we wrap up.

[Catu]

I just found this thread!!!!!

How everything went?

[jocoyn]

Went well, the team found the victim in about 4 hours - and there was much learning.

The search was craftily set up so we cound NOT get our command trailer into a good radio postion and found some flaws in the ointment (our radio guru got sent out as the victim)....So.....we are building some backup command capability (back to tailgate command). It was great because we went into the whole thing completely blind (except for the scenario) as we would on a real search.

We usually run a K9 command at our searches which works directly with the actual Incident commander. They usually let us run the show for deploying the dogs while they are running the rest of the mission.

As far as the K9s it was our typical approach. Immediately deploy trailing dogs at the PLS to extablish direction of travel then deploy air scent dogs using information obtained from the trailing crews (or shift resources as more information comes in)