Gadgetory

the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire claimed the lives of 19 Granite Mountain hotshots from Prescott Arizona when the firefighters exact location couldn't be pinpointed they were quickly being overrun by fire and again some of the last words practice and perishing in the fire or where are you now technology originally developed for the military by new york-based persistent systems aims to drastically improve two-way communications between fire crews and wildfire command centers please task your sensor that area and see if you can establish communication wave really is mobile ad hoc networking it allows every radio to repeat through every other radio no matter how they move no matter how dynamic the situation becomes in Prescott Arizona firefighters are putting wave relayed to the test comes as a harness and if it gets a fix to your chest and it's got a little flip down tablet as you can see right here then it's got a radio system here the radio service personal cell towers for firefighters enabling command centers to better track what's happening in the field we've got a fire crew we've got a couple of different firefighter elements and firefighters to know more about the lay of the land by drawing on a tablet an operation supervisor can remotely guide a fireman to a safer location pictures and live video can also be shared cruise not only receive information via wave relay they can use an android tablet to send crucial information back to the command center I can grab an icon that's like a little water supply icon and I can drag it and drop it exactly where that water supply is and everybody else can see that you can actually look at an area pull a helicopter over and it will tell you if the area you're standing in is an adequate landing zone for that specific style of helicopter wave relay relies on line of sight for communication but there are ways to extend the range of the network one way is to put a radio up on an airplane no one gets to cheat the laws of physics but wave relay hops around it Mountain repeaters help knowles hop over ridges drones are also used to connect radios wave relay also has a lot of applications with unmanned vehicles be it quadcopters or unmanned airplanes that you throw up very small airplanes from 4 to 10 pounds that go up and become a comms relay or provide their video feed down to the ground while the wave relay system shows promise it does need further refining Teddy as compared to a standard wildland firefighting radio so this might be something that would you take off your chest and put in your backpack cost is also a concern for fire departments you're looking at here in its prototype is about ten thousand dollars persistent systems and the Prescott Fire Department planned to continue the testing under that fireman went out with an eye towards using wave relay during next year's fire season in minden Nevada I'm see me das cnet.com for CBS News