Yeah saw a little of that stuff in a CNN special report thingy here:

www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0208/gallery.missingchildren.tech/frameset.exclude.html

You will have to copy and paste and remove the space in exclude. Board doesnt like long urls.

[Edited on 26-8-2002 by Kano]

Yeah okay GPS tracker. Any ideas how it works? GPS tells a reciever where it is it doesnt recieve signals back and then tell someone else where the reciever is. THis thing would have to use a different satelite or radio system to report its positon. Which would make it rather large.

Sounds to me to be the prerunner of the implants thats some say will be all the rage. It smells like Satan to me...

Speaking as a parent, it's something to think about. My son (when he was small) got outside while I was fixing a cut on my daughter's ankle and went wandering off. Luckily he was found by a neighbor and brought back. Another time he missed the bus and nobody knew where he was (a teacher eventually brought him home.)

This is a pretty common event in ANY parent's life. I had a friend whose daughter had a very bad psychosis episode (she's bipolar) and ran off... they weren't able to find her for two days (after she'd started to come out of the psychosis.) Her parents were in agony; a tracker would have let them know where she was.

...and then there's our great-great aunt who has Alzheimers and a tendency to go wandering.

Ok thats a fair point. How did that system work? Was it a low powered transmitter that just bleeped its location continually or did it actualy relay the location to a communications satelite?

If you mean the elk tracking, it used a com sat and sent a data stream timed to transmit when the sat went overhead. Also, the radio signal was picked up locally too but the freq. were kept secret. Many GPS units do the same thing only in reverse when they recieve a radio signal from a beacon close by and correct the error in the field, real time called DGPS (Differential Global Positioning Systems). I don't rely on them but do use them when I get them. I post-process everything I shoot for good measure.

I think most of the elk tracking project is over now as we have a viable popluation. They have exploded using grasslands made by reclaimation of strip mines for a food base as they died out of most of this state when people settled most of the flat areas that once held the grasslands. Of course you won't hear that from any environmentlist but I find the more knowledge comes from conservationalist who understand habitats but thats another subject.