Thanks for that - did you see this article: Assessing the new Three Antenna Transceivers ?
http://en.ortovox.com/Documents/Transceiver_Test_Canada_EN_09.pdf
Any transceiver is better than none! The new three-antenna transceivers are faster in
finding a buried person in an avalanche than the older single antenna transceiver. This is
especially true for the naive user.
I recrunched their figures for two buried tranceivers for experienced users but decided to add the median value into the mix.
Medians put less weight on outlier values and I think give a better view of the data. In this case it would seem that two of the simpler 3 antenna beacons give markedly better performance and the Ortovox F1 is almost as good as the Pieps DSP and Ortovox S1. Overall the Pieps DSP is the fastest beacon to use although the ascending sequence of results look a bit odd.
What does standard deviation tell us? Well it could be an indication of how intuitive the beacon is. In this case the S1 looks like the best of the more complex 3 antenna beacons but it is still beaten by the Ortovox D3 (219€) and Tracker DTS (238€). If you are on a budget either the Ortovox D3 or Ortovox F1 (189€) do the job. I assume that a small amount of training would reduce the STDDEV of the F1.
I’ve not looked in detail at the inexeperienced user figure.
[edited due to errors, See Martin’s post below for details]