Randy Butternubs
Über Member
A friend of mine badly injured himself on a country road a while back. Luckily there was someone with him who could get the postcode from a house down the road and phone for an ambulance. He then messaged me with a google maps location using whatsapp so I could pick up the bike in my car.
I was there in 20 minutes despite having been asleep, thanks to modern phones/sat nav. We kept thinking the ambulance would show up any minute but after waiting two or three hours we were found by a policeman who had been roped into the search.
Devon is hardly remote but you can be 10 minutes drive away from a town and still have limited/nonexistant phone signal, on a road with nobody driving through or living on it. It seems the emergency services want the post code or road name, neither of which you probably know. Even if you know the road it might be several miles long - apparently in our case they searched the road we were on but didn't go far enough. They can try to triangulate your location from the phone signal but it's inaccurate and presumably hard to do when the connection is spotty. Supposedly Android phones now use the GPS to send your location when you dial 999. Didn't seem to work for my friend though.
I think the ideal system for such a situation would be to have an app that could get your coordinates using GPS and send it to the emergency services via SMS. That way you would only need enough signal strength for the phone to squeeze off a text and they would have a pretty accurate idea of your location. I searched but couldn't find anything like that in the UK. Is anyone aware of something like that?
Failing that, I've found this (http://www.emergencysms.org.uk/) which lets you register your phone so that you can contact the emergency services by text. If combined with an app that let you know your coordinates and/or postcode without internet connectivity it could work. Does anyone know of such an app? If you give them your latitude and longitude or OS grid reference can they do anything with it or are they only set up to use postcodes?
Failing all that, does anyone have any good ideas for what to do in such a situation?
I was there in 20 minutes despite having been asleep, thanks to modern phones/sat nav. We kept thinking the ambulance would show up any minute but after waiting two or three hours we were found by a policeman who had been roped into the search.
Devon is hardly remote but you can be 10 minutes drive away from a town and still have limited/nonexistant phone signal, on a road with nobody driving through or living on it. It seems the emergency services want the post code or road name, neither of which you probably know. Even if you know the road it might be several miles long - apparently in our case they searched the road we were on but didn't go far enough. They can try to triangulate your location from the phone signal but it's inaccurate and presumably hard to do when the connection is spotty. Supposedly Android phones now use the GPS to send your location when you dial 999. Didn't seem to work for my friend though.
I think the ideal system for such a situation would be to have an app that could get your coordinates using GPS and send it to the emergency services via SMS. That way you would only need enough signal strength for the phone to squeeze off a text and they would have a pretty accurate idea of your location. I searched but couldn't find anything like that in the UK. Is anyone aware of something like that?
Failing that, I've found this (http://www.emergencysms.org.uk/) which lets you register your phone so that you can contact the emergency services by text. If combined with an app that let you know your coordinates and/or postcode without internet connectivity it could work. Does anyone know of such an app? If you give them your latitude and longitude or OS grid reference can they do anything with it or are they only set up to use postcodes?
Failing all that, does anyone have any good ideas for what to do in such a situation?
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