A Potential Life Saver: Personal Locator Beacon
OceanSignal PLB1 Beacon If your plane is equipped for emergencies with a 121.5 MHz Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) like my Zenith HDS601, you are depending on old technology in case of a crash. The ELT is designed that a force exceeding 5g triggers transmission of a beep signal. Who will pick up the signal? It will unlikely be a ground station due to the line-of-sight limitation of the signal. This leaves any aircraft overhead that is monitoring 121.5. All commercial airliners are tuned in to the frequency, so most likely one of them will contact Air Traffic Control (ATC). They will send out Search and Rescue personnel. Lots of things can go wrong with the process. The ELT antenna may be damaged, the plane may be partially immersed in a creek, . . . Your imagination is the only limit for the possible bad scenarios. If the ELT seemingly cannot transmit the signal, you can remove it from the plane, extend its built-in antenna, and manually trigger the transmission. In my plane, th