Geocaching Australia

Just a question of interest i have is say your out in the bush and fall over and break a leg or get bitten by a snake who do you call?

Say if you dial 000 do you ask for Police, Ambulance or Fire?
or is there a better number to dial in such a situation?

I'm sure no matter who you ask for you will be passed onto the correct authorities although that may waste time.

One thing I have discovered is the police in VIC don't have ready access to GPSrs and they don't want to be told coordinates. So don't expect a speedy responce form them unless you can discribe your location simply to them.

Are you an ambulance subscriber? Helicopter rides could be expensive unless your friends with i! . About the cost of CG.com premium membership down here.

i know up here in Sydney the police listen to coords, was listening to the scanner whilst someone was stuck in the bush on the other side of the valley to my house and you could over the scanner hear that the hiker was giving his coords to the police who were then relaying those coords to the Westpac Helicopter.

I Assume the police would be the ones to call but wasn't sure if there is a number set up for such a situation.

GIN51E wrote:Just a question of interest i have is say your out in the bush and fall over and break a leg or get bitten by a snake who do you call?

Say if you dial 000 do you ask for Police, Ambulance or Fire?
or is there a better number to dial in such a situation?

I'm sure no matter who you ask for you will be passed onto the correct authorities although that may waste time.

If you have a GSM phone, you should dial 112 instead of 000. That way it will use any available carrier it can get, not just the one you are with. It also doesn't need a SIM card, or any money on the card.
This is an international standard for all GSM phones.

EcoDave

EcoTeam wrote:

GIN51E wrote:Just a question of interest i have is say your out in the bush and fall over and break a leg or get bitten by a snake who do you call?

Say if you dial 000 do you ask for Police, Ambulance or Fire?
or is there a better number to dial in such a situation?

I'm sure no matter who you ask for you will be passed onto the correct authorities although that may waste time.

If you have a GSM phone, you should dial 112 instead of 000. That way it will use any available carrier it can get, not just the one you are with. It also doesn't need a SIM card, or any money on the card.
This is an international standard for all GSM phones.

EcoDave

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That is a good point from Eco Dave,
although i'm not sure about most phones except mine has programmed into it Emergency numbers which no matter which one i dial it will go to the 000 hotline using any carrier no matter what number is dialed,
Emergency numbers in my phone are,
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000, 112, 08, 911
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Hi Gin51E,

The Ambulance Service is the primary response authority when contacting 000 for all emergency situations involving prehospital care. In the case you describe, you may even find that police (police rescue), SES and in some rare cases Firies may assist. In any case, it does not matter who you get, as long as the full and correct information is passed on to the Comms Operator. They are trained to deal with this situation and i would suspect they are dealing with this case every day (Motor Vehicle Accidents can be a confusing situation for many, Ambulance for injuries, Police for insurance/traffic issues, Firies for fire concerns ). ALL calls are recorded and can be replayed if there are any concerns over coordinates.

I find it very strange to claim that (in Vic) Police don't want to be told coordinates. The Vic CAD/CAM system is considered one of the best (though there are always minor problems with any system) and as such, the facilities will accomodate coordinates when given. It is always wise to include an alternate verification description, to guarantee the correct location. I have found that whilst some Comms Operator may not fully understand the coordinate systems available, they will always enter ANY information given (in the notes section at the very least). Several searches i have conducted in which the casualty had a GPS (and a sat phone) to transmit their location, was made difficult due to the lack of data given eg. the casualty was unable to correctly explain the coordinates as either ddMM.MMM or ddMMSS.SSS and datum issues.

Just dispelling some myths over 000 verses 112...... The current teachings in AU is to contact 000 in the first instance. 112 is an international standard for GSM phones (perfect for roaming) though there is no requirements to work on CDMA networks (most providers should though). 112 is an alternate number only.......For more information, check out the ACA's emergency call website at http://emergencycalls.aca.gov.au/callin ... obiles.htm

Until recently, if you had access to a Telstra mobile phone and want to play with a trial service to location your position in DD.DDDDD (and provide map references in some cases), send a blank SMS to 1715678 (171LOST) though this seems to be disabled at this time (in my area anyway ). We were using this basic system as another tool to locate people who had access to this network, though the location only provided a very broad area (it's amazing when tourists do not even know where they are in Australia, let alone the nearest town, when lost/injured

Agsmky

Thanks for that agsmky, its all clear now.

I think the RAA (Automobile breakdown service) here in SA can take co-ords as well?
I think team unicycle used it once when he got a flat tyre (One only would take him out I reckon ! )

The Victorian CAD/CAM may be new as is the equivelant system for WA Police but both are based on addresses and store incidents based on the nearest street address.

This means that if you supply coordinates both systems have to record the incident against the nearest street and locality no matter how far away that may be from your coordinates. This has been requested to be changed in WA at least but having seen the database design that supports the system I would say it would take a major rewrite of the systems.

The reason for this is both systems originated from urban based recording systems and do not have GIS capability built natively into the database to handle incidents that happen some distance away from any road.

Having said that all 000 call takers are trained to get as much information as possible so they would normally not ignore a coordinate totally but would also try and get a general description of the area in case the coordinates are not enough. In real life situations the coordinate given may not be actually where the person is for a lot of reasons. It happened here in WA once due to a malfuntion of the GPS involved where the person was more than 1500m from where the GPS said he was. (The GPS was damaged as the person fell the 10m down the slope he was on and due to the state the person was in he didn't know and assumed it was still giving an accurate postition) They only found out because he was still on his mobile when the respoding vehicle went passed him on the track above where he was.

I often listen in on Channel 5 UHFCB and many times have heard rescue operations going on. If you have a UHF radio with you, calling on this channel would always be an option. This is why I say that it is important to look beyond the cheapy "it'll do" 500mw handhelds when buying one.

A 5 watt handheld is not as compact but it will probably get you into the nearest ch5 repeater in most situations.

As far as telephones go, maybe the short answer to this would be to choose the carrier which has the best coverage area. At the moment I think this would be Telstra. In the Deep Berowra Valley near my place. Telstra coverage is consistently more reliable than any other service.

agsmky wrote:send a blank SMS to 1715678 (171LOST) though this seems to be disabled at this time (in my area anyway ).

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I tried this recently from my new CDMA phone to see if it would still work and it came back with "False". Incidentally I see this phone (a Kyocera) has GPS functionality in it that I can't use but it is capable of relaying the location back to emergency services.<p>
Reading up it appears the phones use a combination of GPS and the cell locations to work out your location, how accurate it is or if Telstra have it enabled on their network I don't know.

The communications carriers always have had the ability to tell where you are whilst you are making a call as the timings from the cell points are accurate enough to give them distance from the cell within about 5 metres and most urban cells are a quarter arc so it does narrow it down a bit even with one cell. If they set it up for a special, read legal, purpose they can also link in another cell that can time the calls at the same time and therefore pinpoint your origin to within 10m. All this without any GPS system in the phone. I believe it is only a legal problem (and added cost to some carriers) that stop this being in place at all times. It is something that the emergency services Australia wide want in place sooner rather than later as it can save lives by getting quicker responses to incidents. It also means that the caller doesn't have to be able to talk to get the origin of the phone call.