On Mar 2, 9:42 am, "Bill Daniels" bildan@comcast-dot-net wrote:
If I landout, or worse parachute, I'll be ****ed and won't be a 'happy
camper'. I'll want to go home with my glider ASAP. To hell with the
fishing kit, K-Bar knife and other woodsmen stuff. I'll conceed that
adequate water, a power bar and space blankets are nice.

My priorities a

1. Tell concerned folks exactly where I am, what my condition is, and convey
the idea that I want to get picked up ASAP. I want to carefully select who
I tell about the situation.

2. Get myself and the glider extracted with the least fuss possible
involving natives, police or professional SAR people. I don't want to sound
a general emergency with a ELT or PLB unless absolutely neccessary.

3. Get crew and myself to an establishment serving food and beer.

To this end there are two almost magical devices, Globalstar/Iridium
sat-phones and GPS. We already have GPS so we need phones. Reasonably small
sat-phones cost around $500 and a service contract with zero minutes is
trivial. If you actually need to call from the wild, $2/min is also
trivial. The phones can be rented for $30/week for use at contests and
camps. With the phone, you can even make reservations for food and beer.

Bill Daniels

For off-field landings in places like Nevada, the satellite phones are
the best option. As a poor alternative, you can also use your
radio's emergency frequency to attempt contacting an airliner and ask
them to make a phone call to your crew. It is important that you
state that this is NOT an emergency on each announcement before
someone replies.
An FAA official explained it to me that this would be a perfectly
normal use of the frequency with no subsequent ramifications.

Bela Szalai