truly
Banned
Registered: Nov 2005
Location: minnesota
Posts: 3660 |
All right 'hounded', if you have connections in the R and D dept at Garmin, here is another problem and possible solution:
Using a Garmin during a night hunt is very problematic. If you leave it turned on it must stay at the truck. If you leave it at the truck, and you hunt deep into a large section of land, and now you are over a mile in and time is called and you have to hustle back to the truck to get your Garmin, only to find that your dog is even deeper in the country, so now you have to hustle back in where you just came from. Or you can bring the Garmin with you, but leave it turned off. The problem with this is that if your dog goes out of range with the handheld turned off you don't even have any idea which direction your dog went, and if it got into something that is blocking the signal, or if the dog went super deep you may never find them with the Garmin. An example of this- dogs are cut loose, your dog goes up over a hill [silently], gets in the next valley and chases a raccoon into an old abandoned barn, or rock den, or well. Now when you call time out and turn on your Garmin it does you no good at all.
So here is a possible solution- create a setting on the handheld unit in which the unit is on and gathering data of where your dog has been and the route that you walked in, but will not show any of that info on the screen. Basically create a "sleep" mode. When you want to turn it on to the "live" or "active" mode it will sound an alarm- a trademarked and unchangeable tone or beeping that would be audible up to 25 feet- equal to a cell phone ring. When the handheld goes to the "active mode"it also displays on the screen when it was turned to that mode and for how long. Or better yet, when you put it in the sleep mode it starts a timer and tells you how long it has been in the sleep mode and displays the UKC logo on the screen.
So the whole point of this is that Garmin shows the technology to UKC and UKC changes their definition of Garmins being turned off to mean that they must be in the "sleep" mode. Then a hunter may take his Garmin with him in the night hunt. He may have it turned on [in the sleep mode] and carry it with him during the hunt. In the event that time is called and dogs are lost, the handler may turn handheld to live mode and know where the dog was when it went out of range, or where it is if still in range. If a judge of a cast thinks that a handler has used the handheld during regulation time, he may ask to see the Garmin. If the screen shows the UKC logo, then the judge knows that it is in the sleep mode, and he may see just how long it has been in the sleep mode. So if a handler tried to cheat and slip off to the side and check the where abouts of his dog, the alarm would have sounded, and if the cast did not hear that then the judge could see that the Garmin had only been in the sleep mode for a few minutes and know that it had been used. If the amount of time on the sleep mode was any amount less that the length of that drop, then the handler would be scratched and even barred.
This all sounds a bit complex, but I think a few programmers could add these features into the "brains" of the handheld, and I imagine that UKC would see the benefits of allowing handlers to better know the whereabouts of their dogs when time is called.
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Last edited by truly on 04-13-2011 at 07:47 AM
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04-12-2011 03:37 PM
