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Okay guys and gals, I am in the need to get a new beacon and have kind of settled on the Ortivox brand. I found one that I really like, but I want some feedback from some serious back country riders who know their equipment. Is this a good price for this beacon and is this beacon a good one?

Thanks in advance.

Ortovox S1 Avalanche Beacon

$594.95

Description of Ortovox S1 Avalanche Beacon:The Ortovox S1 Avalanche Beacon uses a sensor-driven triple-antenna design to allow extremely fast multiple-burial searches. Instead of numbers and arrows, the S1 Avalanche Beacon shows a digital grid with icons marking where each victim is located. Just turn until the vertical crosshair is on the signal, and walk forward until this Ortovox beacon says you're there. No grid search, no dealing with flux lines. The S1 leads you directly to your friends and even tells you the depth of the burial. Once a signal is found, just mark it with the push of a button and continue to the next until everyone is located. The S1 Avalanche Beacon also includes an inclinometer, thermometer, and compass, making it the all-in-one backcountry package.

Its a new beacon on the market Rando Steve of Teton AT did a review here is the link http://www.tetonat.com/?p=149.

Its a good beacon, there is not another one like it. That said, I'm a little hesitant because of how long it took to get to the market. Ortovox has been talking about the s1 for a while now.

The price is last years price. According to the current price list, the new retail is $499.99. It will be tough to find one at that price until a little later in the season once the retailers start getting in the new product (October - November)

I will get to play with one on Thursday, I can let you know what I think about it after that.

As far as the all in one package, I don't want my batteries to do anything but send and receive signals. Plus, your beacon should be under most of your clothing, so the thermometer and compass seem pretty much useless to me.

The multi-burial feature on the Orto S1 is awesome, but I can't stress the added benifits of the Mammut Pulse! It can detect up to 8 buried people at once and pretty much achieve the same recovery performance of the S1 without the visual map feature. Instead of a mapping system, Mammut gives you a more functional "compass-like" system to detect victims.

Where Mammut's technology really shines is when an entire group is equiped with the Pulse. This allows all of them to have the added benifit of the Pulse's "triage" feature if the event of a multi-burial occurs. This unique "triage" feature detects a buried victim's vitals and adds another piece of data (above and beyond what the S1 can do) to allow you to make a better decision on which victim has the best chances of being recovered ALIVE, in other words... which victim to dig for FIRST!

To have a beacon that has this added benifit of helping you decide who to dig out first and thus insuring the best possibility of survival is priceless. Simply put, the Pulse, IMO, makes the current crop of beacons "dated" technology.

I'm curious... with all the fancy stuff on the S1; what happens if there's a system failure? I'm comforted knowing that the Pulse, with all its great technology, will revert to a basic analog beacon if the system crashes.

I suggest that you use the Search feature for other S1 and Mammut/Pulse posts here on the forum... there's a lot of other good arguements for the Pulse posted (mostly by me).

I'm interested in the pulse for this season, but not because of the triage feature. I met up with ctowles in Jackson last season and he was showing me how that beacon can tell different beacons apart based on small variations on their transmission frequencies. So you can identify different members of your party by their beacon signals. (Yoda - tell me if that's not accurate.)

It was a very timely demonstration because the day before we had been in a slide with 3 partial burials. All three partial burials were accounted for, but only one of us was able to get his beacon to recieve mode quickly. Anther party member was unaccounted for higher up the hill and we weren't sure if he was under the snow or not. Also, there were other stray signals around as people came closer to the slide. So it took us about 10 confusing & horrible minutes to figure out that no one else was buried. It would have really sucked to waste that time while someone was clinging to their life under the snow. The ability to identify different signals and 'mark' them when they are accounted for would have been really helpful, I think, if the feature works well.

I demo'd it and wasn't a big fan. We had three different beacons to play with including the S1. A DSP, D3, and and Arva Evolution. It didn't play so nice with the DSP. We had to be almost on top of it to get a reading. After playing with it for awhile, it seemed that the beacons had to be a little ways away from each other before turning them on. Turning the beacons on close to one another seemed to cause this problem. I have no idea why. The range wasn't so hot either. Searching was sweet though once you got a signal.
The real problem was the flip phone case for me. It was difficult to open without gloves on. With some practice it got easier, but that is the last thing I want to fuck with in a rescue situation. Geeze, that would be tough enough. I like super easy gear to work with. Simplicity is genius in my book.

When did you demo it? Was it last years version or this years version?



Was that true for all the beacon or just the DSP?

I'm curious... about these facts. Where are they stated? I recently bought a Pulse on sale, and it seems like a nice beacon (though I haven't had a chance to really test it out yet). I read through the manual and didn't see either of these facts mentioned. Is there additional info somewhere?

It was the version that came out last year. I haven't been by the Patroller Supply offices to see if they have received any of this seasons models.

I just noticed it with the DSP. We did not have any problems with the other two models.

Yo JimW,

I used a Pulse for most of last winter. In practicing I think I had up to five beacons buried and it recognized them all and pretty easily lets you choose which one to search for first. Not sure if eight is the limit or not (I sure hope I'm never looking for eight buried folks).

In terms of the analog function, I believe Yoda is correct, but I never used it in pure analog. I know one reason the older Barryvox beacon was popular with guide types was that you could customize the settings so that it used the pure analog function when you got close to the buried tranceiver. I believe this continues to be the case with the Pulse, but again I never tested it this way.

For the hardcore snow nerd, BCA has excellent reports on their website. I personally find the Obsolescence and Analog Avalanche Transceivers report terrifying.

http://www.bcaccess.com/tech_library/tech_reports.php

That was a bit concerning. I'm guessing that the beacons were tested outside of clothing at ambient air temps. If you beacon is staying inside your coat, it will keep pretty warm.

Hmm, that report is pretty interesting (and scary). It sure seems to point to the Tracker DTS as the best performing beacon when you're searching for analog beacons that have significant frequency shift. Yoda, any comments on that with regard to the Pulse? Has the receive bandwidth been widened compared to the Barryvox unit used in the tests in that report? I think it's quite likely that typical search scenarios are going to include older analog beacons, and not all Pulse beacons, nice as that would be.

What I take away from that report is 1. to check that all the beacons in my group talk to each other (duh) and 2. to ditch those older beacons.

The ability to measure drift is a cool DPS feature.