We now have a couple of Elements and they seem to work as billed. You can put them in the hands of clients and have them getting good results with them pretty quickly. The signal does maybe jump a bit in the coarse search phase (as Rolf mentioned) but I don’t think it’s a big deal and it fits well with the “landing strip” idea. Close up (under 3 or 4 m), where I’ve used them personally the most they seem very solid. I need to play with them more myself in the coarse search to see what’s happening.
Simple to turn on & easy to engage group check.
no backlight like the Pulse and no headphone jack so not the best device for anyone that expects to be part of a organised or night rescue.
As an FYI, Decathlon(FR) & Quechua @ Domancy have the Pulse at 299€ which is a good price, it’s limited stock (you can check on the Decathlon website but not the Quechua one) and most importantly, they tell me, it’s not got firmware version 3.2 so you need to factor in the upgrade cost. Decathlon don’t have the fleet management gear to do the upgrade.
I think you can get another 5% off at Quechua if you buy a shovel and probe at the same time. Unfortunately I didn’t reckon a lot to their shovels so I’m not sure it’s worth the saving.
I also wasn’t wildly impressed with the probes. I didn’t notice until recently that cheaper probes use cord and not wire between the sections. It looks to me that if you regularly assemble and collapse a probe with cord it will fray and break while the old Ortovox 240’s we have with cables are going strong after about 15 years.
I think the Pulse deal will last until they’ve cleared the stock, they’ve no fleet management gear so they’re presumably not intending to support the pulse or the element.
The lack of fleet management shows how serious they are though, still 300 is a good price for the Pulse.
BTW anyone know what the 457Khz transmit error signifies? I got this wearing a Pulse a couple of weeks back and had to restart the beacon. I assume it is the transmit self test that gives this message. Only data point was the beacon was next to a digital camera (off). It is a bit worrying if you get this under a meter of snow.
Thanks for the update on the Element, sounds like a good beacon given a bit of practice.
457 SEND? Yes, it is most often caused by EMI, phone, camera etc or metal object. A good test but if you do a group check with it out of the harness then it’s not testing the real position. Of course you can run group check blind from the powerup in the harness, the tones are self explanatory.
Beware of the sent error! It often means there is a problem with your clothing: magnetic buttons, iron belts, strange zippers, etc. And offcourse the allready mentioned phones, walkie talkie’s, etc.
The practical difference on the element is only in the fine search where the arrow only shows forward & back, you can set the updated pulse the same as well. You can still go side to side and the distance goes down of course.
If you do only a (fine) landing strip does it work? It seems to, no doubt if you did go side-to-side then you might have got a lower reading. What I’ve not tried though is a deeper burial, more than 1metre for example.
But, there’s some technique to probing and it takes time so moving effort to that phase has cost. I’d be slightly worried about introducing differences in search protocols for my own work though, I want to explain a basic usage that works with the gear we use (mostly Pulse or Element) but works if our clients go and rent or buy a tracker the next week. So last week using the elements for the first time I was telling people to go side to side still.
The “landing” technique is interesting. In theory you’ve followed a flux line to the victim and you should now be in a horizontal line above the victim. In reality it seems pretty easy to “land” on one side of the victim.
Beware of the sent error! It often means there is a problem with your clothing: magnetic buttons, iron belts, strange zippers, etc. And offcourse the allready mentioned phones, walkie talkie’s, etc.
thanks for that, I checked on the Mammut web site and they say
My devices displays “457 SEND failure“. What is the cause?
This message appears if a deviation in the sending performance is detected during the power-on self-test (when you turn the device on). This normally happens when other electronic devices or metal objects (e.g. ice axe, magnetic jacket buttons) impede the sending performance. It is a built-in safety feature of the device. In this case, the red SEND LED no longer blinks, indicating to the user that something is wrong. The device is still sending signals, which can also be impeded by external interference.
If this message appears in the absence of any external interference, the device is defect and must be diagnosed by a Service Center.
The practical difference on the element is only in the fine search where the arrow only shows forward & back, you can set the updated pulse the same as well. You can still go side to side and the distance goes down of course.
If you do only a (fine) landing strip does it work? It seems to, no doubt if you did go side-to-side then you might have got a lower reading. What I’ve not tried though is a deeper burial, more than 1metre for example.
But, there’s some technique to probing and it takes time so moving effort to that phase has cost. I’d be slightly worried about introducing differences in search protocols for my own work though, I want to explain a basic usage that works with the gear we use (mostly Pulse or Element) but works if our clients go and rent or buy a tracker the next week. So last week using the elements for the first time I was telling people to go side to side still.
Thnx Ise!
(A’Landing strip only’procedure should by the way work with other transceivers as well)
clearly, but this shows the potential risks of some innovation in transceiver design, if there’s a significant divergence then techniques learned with one device don’t work with another or the protocol used by one professional doesn’t match the one used by the next. For people out for a couple of trips each season the risk is this becomes confusing.
