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  • From: Una Smith <una.smith@att.net>
  • To: Mounted search and rescue <msar-riders@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [MSAR] GPS training
  • Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:55:32 -0600

Lois Guyon wrote:
>We just obtained four Rino 130 GPS units.

Lucky you.

>What is the best way to train our 20 volunteers to use them?

Pick the best four volunteers, the ones who attend the
most trainings and seem to be learning the fastest. Do
not make it a private deal; make a little ceremony of
it at a meeting. Convey the message that these folks
get to use a cool new toy (ahem, tool) as their reward
for good past performance. And above all these folks
must be reliable, so you have confidence of getting the
units back from them someday. First let these folks
learn to use the Rinos well, then have them teach the
others.

At the community college nearest you, ask the reference
librarian about good books on motivating and teaching
adults, experiential education, learning through doing,
etc.


>How are they best used?

Making added use of their special *combination* function
as radio and GPS? That would be any field exercise where
the riders work out of sight yet still in close physical
coordination with each other. Such exercises include line
searching with a very wide spacing between riders, night
searching, and (highly redundant) sign cutting with 2 or
more riders in parallel, and similar techniques requiring
able riders with SAR experience. If you don't have many
such folks, then you can use the Rinos for better field
team supervision. With inexperienced folks, it is tempting
to create artificial opportunities to do line searches,
just to keep a large number of SAR-inexperienced riders
occupied. That often leads to span-of-control problems.
Use the Rinos to break those too-large newbie groups into
much smaller teams, each with one Rino, and have them use
their other tools as usual but use the Rinos to monitor,
real time, where the teams are and in what direction and
how fast they are moving. That will tell you which teams
are having trouble with common MSAR tasks such as:

Ride and at the same time...
...talk on the radio
...listen on the radio
...take notes
...use their GPS
...use their compass
...eat their lunch
...read a map
...navigate, especially off trails
...notice they may be in a radio blind spot, so check in
once they're clear again (this is a subtle one!)

Analysis will tell you if the team is moving too fast to do
a careful job. Eg, galloping through a grassy meadow where
their task is to look for tracks. Or too slow: crawling
through a field where only a quick, cursory look is needed.
These suggest social and/or management training issues that
need further attention. Are your folks a bunch of yahoos?
People who cannot/will not follow directions? Or were the
directions incoherent? Or is there some other problem? In
the same vein, analysis will tell you if the team had some
problem that they later forget to mention during their
debrief. "Team A, why did it take you 15 minutes to cross
the little stream here on this map?"

Most of this can be determined after the fact by analysis
of GPS tracks recorded and later downloaded. But by the
time the analysis is done, the team has already packed up
and left for home. Also, if the analysis is real-time, it
is also more context sensitive and vastly easier on the
brain: the watcher knows all that is known at that moment,
and can immediately forget what's not of interest. Best
of all, real-time analysis often provides a chance to solve
a problem during the exercise rather than only discuss it
later in a debrief.

Una Smith
New Mexico




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