PULSE CHECK: Mammut introduces first transceiver to transmit vital information
"One more piece of arsenal to help save lives."
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This fall, Swiss alpine gear manufacturer Mammut will make available the new Pulse Barryvox, the first avalanche transceiver that displays pulse and respiration data of buried individuals.
As survival chances are greatly reduced after the first 20 minutes of burial, the beacon allows for avalanche rescue triage in multiple burial rescue situations.
“Hopefully, you aren’t ever in that situation, but if you are, it’s one more piece of arsenal you can use to help save lives,” says Darsie Culbeck, director of Alaska Mountain Guides. Culbeck will outfit his guides with the transceiver in the upcoming season.
According to a Swiss study of avalanche deaths over several years, 15 percent of deaths resulted from impact or trauma during the slide and 35 percent of incidents involved multiple burials. With the vital information transmitted by the beacon, spending crucial minutes recovering a non-survivor of the slide while others are still alive could be avoided.
Other firsts include the three-antenna receiver feature which switches from digital to analog mode, and a direction arrow whose 360-degree swivel points toward the buried victim.
“They are super easy to use for first-time folks,” Culbeck said. “They’re a complex beacon with a lot of various settings. Set it for the simplest users, or for our guides who can switch between analog and digital.”
Though the beacon can detect a respiration or pulse, it does not transmit what the respiration or pulse is. When no respiration or pulse is detected, it displays, “no signal.” In digital mode the range of the receiver is less than 50m, while in analog it is less than 60m. The cost of the Pulse Barryvox is $399.
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