Beacons ‘routine’

Locator beacons are becoming a routine part of the outdoors, a southern beacon trust says.

Southland Locator Beacons Ltd – owned by the Southland Locator Beacon Charitable Trust – has seen a 40 per cent increase in locator beacon sales during the past 18 months, due in part to an ongoing change in the way the lifesaving safety devices are being used. Southland Locator Beacons chairman John Munro said the days when beacons were rejected as unnecessary and even ‘‘unmacho’’ were long gone.

‘‘It’s a regulation piece of kit for anyone spending significant amounts of time outdoors or rurally nowadays. The increase in sales has been driven mainly by the changing health and safety landscape, where contractors, freight companies, farmers and the like use them for safety in areas where cellphone coverage isn’t great.’’ The trust also hires out its ACR-brand beacons, with a standard week’s hire coming in at $40.

The current purchase price was $449, Munro said.

Although he estimated the trust’s locator beacons had saved about 400 lives during its 23 years of operation, Munro and his board are not resting on their laurels.

‘‘You always want to expand your reach and make improvements.’’ The beacons cannot be activated remotely. That means if a user is unable activate their beacon, there is no way to track them by remote activation when a red flag is raised at the end of their hire period.

Having now developed a remote activation feature for the ACR model with the help of an Otagobased electronic engineer, the trust was awaiting a patent approval, before working with ACR to integrate the new feature, Munro said.