THE news that personal locater beacons (PLBs) can now be legally used throughout the UK has been welcomed by NFU Scotland as a ‘potentially lifesaving tool’ for farmers.
PLBs (known as EPIRBs for sea travel and ELTs for air travel) are already available for use in the aviation and maritime industries as part of the existing licensing and registration regime, regulated by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency on behalf of the Department for Transport.
Personal locater beacons could prove to be a valuable tool to ecologist such as myself who regularly need to undertake lone working at remote locations.
Good idea that lee. Sometimes we as ecological consultants are in a position where we are lone-working, and it's nice to know that there is an easy solution. Have previously used "buddy systems" but this doesn't always work where you are in an area with poor phone signal! We had a situation last year where sites were being broken into, and we believe it was the same person, who was harrassing one of our staff. This kind of situation can't be avoided as it was a demented volunteer. But the member of staff concerned was doing a lot of lone-working at the time and therefore had to ensure that there was no lone working for some time, whilst this was situation was being investigated. Thanks for the updates too! For obvious reasons, I have not put our name here as we do not want a similar situation. Hope this is ok.
Posted by: The team at Sussex Ecology | January 29, 2012 at 12:28 AM