The purpose of this page is to provide our team members and visitors with a
launching point to find potentially useful information. Some of this
information is provided by search and rescue teams, government agencies,
individuals, or commercial vendors. This is not just a generic "links" page,
but rather an attempt to help you find useful information related to search
and rescue and outdoor recreation; as such, we do not generally add links here
by "reciprocal link request" by the owners of sites, especially for commercial
sites. We select sites primarily based on recommendations from our team
members.
Cibola Search and Rescue makes no warranty of the quality of information
you can get from these sites --- we have simply found them useful or
interesting and want to help you get there. Sites are added to this list
pretty much as we find them, and are mostly selected by the webmaster.
Inclusion of a link here does not constitute an endorsement by Cibola Search
and Rescue.
SAR Teams:
Sites selected because they provide useful information for the benefit of
other SAR teams or the general public. These sites provide information on
wilderness survival, safety and medicine, research on SAR topics, search
management, training methods, and similar documentation. Some sites also
provide excellent reference materials and/or software. This list is
provided as a service to our teammembers and the wider SAR community so
that interesting source material may be collected in one place.
The State of New Mexico EMS board recognizes only Wilderness Medical Associates courses for
wilderness medical training.
The UNM EMS
Academy offers Wildernes Medical Associates training courses.
Want to make realistic injuries for your medical folks to practice on?
Go visit Image Perspectives for training
and materials for realistic injury simulation.
Resources for self-study
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has an excellent series of
self-study courses. The IS-195 course that used to be linked to from this
page is no longer available there, but you might find some of these
interesting:
TopoWeb
has an interesting collection of map-reading lessons and other information.
Geocaching is a fun sport with
great potential as a Search and Rescue training get-together. Check out this
synthesis of GPS, map-reading, searching and hiking skills.
http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/
is a great resource, and from there you can get maps and publications on topo
map symbols. Unfortunately, they change their links very, very frequently,
and when I put links to specific publications in here they become outdated too
fast. Sorry.
You can download digitized USGS Topo maps of all of New Mexico from the
New Mexico Search And Rescue Resources
page at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Some of them are very old, though.
You can buy digital raster graphics of current USGS Topo maps
through the USGS Mapping Information
Center. You can buy other digital cartographic products such as Digital
Elevation Models and Digital Line Graphs there, too.
You can get some pretty nice map data (and view online maps) at the National Atlas
The Geographic Resources Analysis
Support System is a full-featured open-source Geographic Information
System that can display, manipulate and process digital cartographic
information of many varieties. You can use it to generate custom maps, create
a database of geographic information, gather statistics, etc., etc.,etc.
Mostly a Unix product, there is a Windows port requiring the Cygwin
environment. It is Not Easy To Use, but it is very powerful.
If you want easy to use: You can use
Waypoint+ to plot data from your GPS unit on your computer.
GPS
Utility is another PC GPS program with the capacity to load in digitized
maps and plot your GPS data overlayed on them. This is the best of the lot
for casual use, and combined with the digital raster graphics files from USGS or sar.lanl.gov you can do some pretty neat stuff
with it. There is a free version for download, but to unlock all the features
you have to pay a little. It's worth it.
For some really geeky fun, learn more about geodetic datums with this
article on The
Basics of Classical Datums (a PDF file, requires Acrobat to read).
FCC database: If you are a ham already, you should be familiar
with the Universal Licensing System,
or ULS. The ULS is where you go if you want to renew your unexpired ham
license (no sooner than 90 days before the expiration date!) or update your
address when you move. Public Service licenses are now also under the ULS
database.
FCC Regulations: You can get to the regulations governing the
amateur radio service (and others) from the Government Printing office Access web
site. Use their search engine on the terms "47 CFR 97" (which means "Title
47 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 97," which is where the amateur
radio regulations live. Public Service/Public Safety band radio use is
governed by a different set of regulations, "47 CFR 90." These regulations
are updated often, so I won't provide a direct link to those sections
here. Do a search from the top level of GPO's site, and choose the most
recent set that comes up in your search results.
Exams and studying
Test yourself with practice exams from the official question
pools using this ham
exam practice page
If you want to learn
morse code
to get to the technician-with-code, general or amateur extra class
licences, here's a reference on the Koch
method of morse code training
Check out G4FON's Koch CW Trainer for Windows 98/NT/XP. I
have not used it, but it looks like a slick interface. Download the companion
file KochRx to
check on your copy ability as you use the Koch CW Trainer.
Ham University also has exam
and code study tools. I'm told the code practice tool runs natively under
Windoze, unlike Supermorse, which must be run by booting Windoze into "DOS
mode."
If you're a complete geek like the CSAR webmaster, you can try
to use the tiny morse code generating programs he wrote for UNIX
machines. You'll need
morse.c,
and maybe
randword.c
and the shell script
koch.
These are not download-and-play programs, they're source code and
you need to have a programming environment installed on your
machine (and it really, really should be UNIX).
Unix Geek? Ham? Most ham radio software for *nix is really only
able to run under Linux. One of the exceptions is Xastir, the X Amateur Station Tracking and
Information Reporting package. It runs under Linux, FreeBSD and appears to be
portable enough to run under any other Unix; someone has even ported it to
Windows using the Cygwin package. It is
a VERY nice Unix APRS package. With Xastir and a few external
libraries (I highly recommend installing "libgeotiff" and everything it
depends on, and shapelib) you can import a wide variety of maps, connect to a
TNC and 2m radio and watch hams scurry about their businessm all overlaid on
street or topographic maps of your area. I installed libgeotiff and was able
to import USGS DRG maps (from the mapping information center, above) directly,
and have multiple (as in hundreds of) maps automatically loaded,
georeferenced, trimmed of superfluous margin materials and spliced together in
a matter of seconds. It's lovely, and I highly recommend it.
Speaking of APRS, lemme get that slobbering iron and build a TinyTrakII from Byonics so I can put an APRS tracker into
my truck and advertise to the world how little I travel...
Ham? Like Orienteering? Wanna combine the two? Try Transmitter Hunting. The Amateur
Radio Direction Finding group here in Albuquerque is a great way to hone your
map and compass skills, while simultaneously honing your equipment building
skills and physical stamina. A great SAR activity (and in fact the current
president of NM SAR Support is the leader of this group!).
Gear:
This list is provided for information and entertainment only; Cibola SAR does
not endorse any of the products which might be advertised on these pages.
This one has lots of info about base station, cellular phone and
hand-held radio antennas and human health effects
Backscratching(as in "you scratch our back, we scratch
yours"): These are some of the sites that have linked
to Cibola SAR and from which we've received visitors. It is a tiny fraction
of them, I'm only adding them as I notice people coming to our site from these
places (list begun on 5 Aug 2002, will add sites as I find them). I'm not
including links that are already listed above, nor am I including the dozens
of places that seem to think the UTM Converter is worth linking to. This
is not meant to be an exhaustive list of SAR team links --- it is meant as a
courtesy, making sure that we return the favor to sites that bring us
visitors.
The Companion
Website for the Laboratory Manual in Physical Geology, 8th Edition by the
American Geological Institute and the National Association of Geoscience
Teachers includes a link to our Map Reading Minilesson.
Knots on the
Web links to a newsletter in which our first "knot minilesson" was published.
Scoutway
references for scoutmasters has a link to our Land Navigation Training
Handout.
My one and only exception to the rule of "no backlinks to folks that link
to the UTM converter." This is Paula Messina's
overheads for a lecture on "GIS's roots in cartography." Lots of
interesting material there, pity the lecture notes don't accompany the
viewgraphs. I found the overheads for Professor Messina's entire "Introduction to GPS/GIS
Mapping" course extremely informative, and wish I lived near San Jose
so I could take the course.
The
American Chemical Society's website chemistry.org has an article on hypothermia
entitled "Surviving
the Big Chill" that includes a link to Mike Dugger's Hypothermia Minilesson.
This article appeared in the December 2001 issue of their magazine ChemMatters,
a quarterly magazine for high school chemistry students.
Boy Scout Troop 299 of Tacoma, Washington links to our land navigation
handouts and minilesson from their scouting links page
Greater Houston SAR Dogs links
our minilessons in the "Articles" category of their "Web Links" database.
Dead links
Once upon a time these sites linked to us, but
on 23 Feb 05 they were found to be unavailable, or no longer link to us
at all. I picked through the list again on 30 Jan 2007 and found a few more
that have gone off-line in the last couple of years.
Rescue Dogs in Skaraborg,
Sweden has a link to Cibola's site on their "Länkar" page,
under "Rescue Dogs" (go figure). They once had a comment about the site on
this page in Swedish and just after Michael Kjorling confirmed that my
translation of "bra-å-veta-om-räddning" as "good-to-know-about-rescue" was
correct I discovered that the link was changed so that it referenced our
team's main site without commentary --- and now the whole site is gone.
Pete Knoebel created an entertaining Web
Quest as part of his high school math class lesson on the mathematics of
SAR. Several of the pages linked back to Cibola's minilessons. The site was
meant to be a temporary one, and it is gone now.
Wiltshire Search and Rescue
(WILSAR) in the UK used to have a link to our site on their "worldwide SAR"
links page, but they don't have a worldwide SAR page anymore.
