UWIS dive: SAR exercise
UWIS in Search & Rescue exercise (Southwest Finland Emergency Services)
Mission: Track the SAR divers during their sector searching dives and record the routes. In one dive there was a doll which was tracked as well.
Watch video from here:
UWIS Search
Water rescue- and lifting cars were parked next to river Aura. Two rescue divers at the same time had a mission to present as perfect sector-searching tracks as possible.
UWIS buoys (3 pcs) were installed so that two of them was in the same side with divers and one in opposite side. Due to the city interference to the GPS data the buoys locations were permanently attached and their coordinates were settled manually.
Water temperature was 18 degrees of Celsius, visibility zero and maximum depth was 4 meters.
Divers used double 4L air tanks and UWIS diver units were installed to one of those per diver.
During the dive management used UWIS Tracker software for real time dive tracking. UWIS Pro Case includes (optional) robust Panasonic Toughbook CF20A which has IP65 water protection and touch screen with rain mode opportunity.
Maximum distance between the Master buoy and PC should be typically under 100m but with external WLAN antenna it can be even 1km.
UWIS Tracker shows diver's actual location, alias name and depth. The lenght of the track tail is adjustable and background map can be loaded beforehand (offline). Satellite and street views are options at the moment.
By using UWIS Tracker the management can send some pre-defined messages to the divers, follow the dive times and possible automatic alarms which the system generates according to settings.
UWIS units and PC with UWIS Tracker collects log data during the dives. Log data is possible to upload into KML, GeoJSON or NMEA formats and use later in reports.
This screenshot from Google Earth shows the routes of two dives. UWIS can track divers every two seconds so in case of two divers, updating time is four seconds per diver. In this case we had eight seconds updating time per diver (older generation). With two seconds intervals the track is smoother.
This data is available right after dive so it is easy to send for example to the command center from the field.
Doll rescued.
One UWIS diver unit is good to instal to the doll as well. Then management will follow the success of the searching and department don't lose the expensive doll.