NUNAVUT - The Government of Nunavut has purchased 500 "Spot" personal satellite trackers for members of the public and search and rescue crews to use, and there will be at least 25 in each community.

Response and rescue manager Brenda Panipakoocho compares a new Spot personal satellite tracker unit, left, with an older emergency locator beacon. The beacons are designed for boating, but the Spots are lighter and more versatile. She says the Spots still need more testing under Arctic conditions. - Gabriel Zarate/NNSL photo

Time is of the essence for any search and rescue in the Arctic, says Ed Zebedee, director of Protection Services in the Department of Community and Government Services.

"We don't want to have searches going on for days and days and days looking for people," he said. "It puts our search members at risk and the longer we look, the less chances there are of finding someone surviving."

Zebedee said the Spot units are meant to address some of the shortcomings of the personal locator beacons already in use in Nunavut. The emergency personal radio indicating beacons (EPIRBs) have been available to the public in every community but have been underused, Zebedee said.

The new Spot personal satellite trackers are smaller, less expensive and more versatile than the locator beacons, which have the limitation that they are all-or-nothing. Setting off a beacon means a search operation has to start and there's no way of knowing if the device got set off by accident.

In addition, the beacons have to be rearmed after every use. That means sending it back to the manufacturer, which costs the government $500 each time.

The Spots have a setting where they send a message to a website every 10 minutes, so anyone with the right code can watch a traveller's progress. There's also an emergency button, which alerts whoever the unit is programmed to contact by e-mail.

During the satellite trackers' early testing, David Akeeagok, deputy minister of CGS at the time, took a Spot with him on a hunting trip. Using the tracking function, Protection Services personnel were able to watch Akeeagok's journey, accurately guessing when he shot a caribou because his signal stopped moving while he harvested it.

The tracking function will be particularly useful for co-ordinating search crews, Zebedee pointed out. A co-ordinator in an office will be able to track the search crews as they travel, and see where search crews have missed a valley to let them know when they need to double back.

Response and rescue manager Brenda Panipakoocho said the old beacons are still good for watercraft because their relative bulk does not matter as much as on a snow machine and qamutik, where space is tight. The units can be attached to a boat and will trigger automatically if they sink more than eight feet (2.5 metres) underwater.

The beacons have been underused, Panipakoocho said, because people in some communities are reluctant to sign them out from the RCMP detachments where most of them are kept. So the Spots will be distributed to the search and rescue co-ordinators in each community, most of whom work out of the local hamlet offices.

Panipakoocho said the Spots still needed some additional testing in Nunavut's unique conditions, such as evaluating how long the AA batteries last in the Arctic cold. Also, it's not clear if the Spots will be effective in the high latitudes around Grise Fiord.

To supplement the Spots, the department has also purchased laptop computers and modems for the communities' search and rescue co-ordinators. Most of the co-ordinators have been operating without computers until now. They will now be able to track their community's search teams through their Spot units.

Zebedee said the government of Nunavut pays the cost of search and rescues, as long as the rescue isn't as a result of negligence. For example, going out on the land without a guide and without adequate supplies and preparation might be considered negligent. As more extreme adventure tourists explore Nunavut, Zebedee anticipates more such rescues in the future.

There were 140 searches conducted last year.

"We don't mind the ones that wrap up in a day, but the ones that are 48 hours or longer or a week, teams get burned out," Zebedee said.

Zebedee said he could remember many searches where having a locator of some kind would have made things much simpler and possibly saved lives. The longest search Zebedee could recall was two years ago outside Iglulik, which lasted seven weeks.

"We would have went out to them that evening, we would have brought them home and one gentleman wouldn't have lost his life (if he had had a tracking unit)," he said.