Today Mountain Rescue England and Wales held the first ever national MR Technology and Innovation day at the excellent venue of the Lancashire Constabulary Headquaters complex at Hutton, Preston.

The day was aimed at providing an event for mountain rescue members to experience items of innovation and technology that others within and allied to the mountain rescue community are developing or utilising at the current time, and to discuss these with relevance to MR operations.

Presentations on the day included communications, the increasing role of IT based solutions in MR including GIS and GPS, incident management, personal locator beacons, and training sotware packages.

The aim of the day was to bring such topics to a wider audience, promote discussion and encourage continuing and future development of such systems.
Included in the distinguished list of very knowledgable presenters was our very own Steve Fletcher, who described to the meeting his findings regards ’A trial solution to integrate Smart phones / PDAs MR map.’

Thanks are expressed to Iain Nicholson (of BPMRT, MPSRO Chairman, SARDA Wales) and his helpers for arranging this very informative and useful day, which hopefully will be repeated on an annual basis.