These are the essential skills that I believe to be most important for the competent ground searcher to possess. I’ll include links to education materials, tutorials, etc, but on this page I’ll restrict it to a simple listing. If you already possess these skills, you could be a valuable asset to SAR missions immediately. Most hardcore outdoor enthusiasts, including climbers, bikers, kayakers, skiers, will already have many/most of these skills, and might only require a slight bit of extra training to gain the last few specialized bits.
- Navigation Skills
- Be able to use phone to determine the coordinates for your current location
- Be able to enter a set of coordinates into the phone and save a destination waypoint
- Be able to use the phone to navigate to that destination waypoint
- Be able to use your phone to record your own track
- Be able to follow (trace) a track that has been provided to you
- Be able to use the phone (or a compass) to determine a bearing to some visual landmark (“the footprints head off into the desert on a bearing of 245 degrees”)
- Radio communication Skills
- Know how to carry a radio without accidentally holding down the mic button
- Know how to switch channels
- Know how to adjust the volume and squelch
- Basic competency with radio conversational etiquette (“Incident Base, this is Team 1″…”Team 1, this is Incident Base”).
- Self-sufficiency and general outdoor competency
- Know how to NOT become a subject yourself
- Regardless the weather, the dark, the distance… at any point you should be able to self extract back to your vehicle with zero assistance from anyone else.
There will be a whole lot of people who read the above list and think to themselves “well none of that is very hard.” This brings us to another personal soapbox point: the hard part is not the skills; the hard part is continually saying “yes” to those 2AM 2-hr drive missions. For more on this, check out the How to Participate page.