Using voicemail to record location in emergency

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ncutler
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by ncutler »

Paulatic wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 12:47pm Can you explain why it isn’t stupid?
I said it was "not completely stupid", That means that it is mostly stupid, but there is a element, in this case rather tiny, that is possibly not stupid.
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matt2matt2002
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by matt2matt2002 »

thirdcrank wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 3:19pm
I believe the idea was to change your voice mail as you are about to set off,
That's not what it says in the pictured twitter.

Incidentally, one of the suggested scenarios is being in a broken down car, which in most circumstances would still have the capability to charge a mobile phone. Mrs thirdcrank is relaxed about keeping her mobile charged and I hope I'm never in a position to say "I told you so." There's an extra long phone cable prominently stored in our car, long enough to be able to use a phone out of the car.
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matt2matt2002
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by matt2matt2002 »

ncutler wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 5:58pm
Paulatic wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 12:47pm Can you explain why it isn’t stupid?
I said it was "not completely stupid", That means that it is mostly stupid, but there is a element, in this case rather tiny, that is possibly not stupid.
Not completely could mean partially.
Sorry, that's my maths doctorate coming out. Let's not quibble over semantics.
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by ncutler »

Serious ( complete not partial ) thread drift warning.
matt2matt2002 wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 8:10pm Not completely could mean partially.
Sorry, that's my maths doctorate coming out. Let's not quibble over semantics.
Wot i think is, in order to be kind to mere cyclists such as myself who don't know how many beans make five; mathematical genii should stick to calculating bicycle gearing in inches like us English grads aint able to as it makes our heads hurt, and like leave the grammaticalisated language stuff to us as enjoys a good argument is wot i think. I mean partial is about parts innit; and how many parts makes partial is what I want to know, and please no talk 'bout percentages as makes head hurtn worser. ?

PS. I thought The Semantics were a boy band.
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by mjr »

PT1029 wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 12:30pm Might be worth getting We3words on your phone (999 service now use this).
https://what3words.com/products/what3words-app/

It was covered in a thread on this forum at some point.
Yeah, only if you want to send 999 to the wrong end of the county due to misheard homophones or plurals, all while furthering a private commercial attempt to seize control of geolocation. Better to enable Emergency SMS
https://firstaidtrainingcooperative.co. ... -text-999/
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millimole
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by millimole »

mjr wrote:
PT1029 wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 12:30pm Might be worth getting We3words on your phone (999 service now use this).
https://what3words.com/products/what3words-app/

It was covered in a thread on this forum at some point.
Yeah, only if you want to send 999 to the wrong end of the county due to misheard homophones or plurals, all while furthering a private commercial attempt to seize control of geolocation. Better to enable Emergency SMS
https://firstaidtrainingcooperative.co. ... -text-999/
I was on a Zoom training course last week (H&S) where W3w came up. The trainer said that his voluntary organisation has dropped its recommendations to use it after repeated failures during dummy run training exercises due to exactly what you've described.
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by thirdcrank »

It's now just over thirty years since I spent some time on the receiving end of 999 calls. Perhaps somebody with more recent experience than mine may comment. Or probably not.

I'm pretty sure that the technology exists for the exact location of a phone sending an emergency call to be pinpointed to the recipient. I fancy there are two main things stopping this:
  • Until they are up a creek without a paddle, between a rock and a hard place etc., many influential people don't want to share the info
  • The authorities don't want the expense of keeping up with the technology.
During lockdown, I've been doing a lot of passive viewing. (Like passive smoking, but when somebody else has the telly on.) One programme I seem to have seen a lot of is about the North-West Ambulance Service. Apparently, if the Scottish counterpart is overwhelmed with calls, the excess is diverted to Merseyside. In a recent episode, the service covering Scotland lost power and with it all its communications. So, every call was diverted to the already fully-stretched service in North West England. However, nobody had apparently planned for this predictable scenario so a supervisor was left to improvise using a private mobile phone to communicate with their opposite number in Scotland. Plus ça change ...
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by Jdsk »

thirdcrank wrote: 24 Oct 2021, 10:04amI'm pretty sure that the technology exists for the exact location of a phone sending an emergency call to be pinpointed to the recipient.
The next generation of standards for emergency calls and advanced mobile location, from ETSI:
https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/press-rel ... 9538703283

includes:

As more than 70% of emergency calls come from a mobile phone in Europe, the Advanced Mobile Location (AML) technology is essential to provide the most accurate location of the caller. With AML the phone's location capabilities (making use of GNSS, WIFI and cellular network information) are activated when an emergency number is dialed. The location obtained is then sent to a location endpoint managed by, or on behalf of, a national emergency service. These technologies can provide a location precision as good as 5m outdoors (and averaging to within circular areas of ~25 m radius for indoor locations), a significant improvement on existing cell coverage provided by mobile networks, which average (across the UK as an example) circular areas of about 1,75 km radius.

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MarcusT
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by MarcusT »

This discussion took a wild turn.
My solution is to create a group of EPCs on Whatsapp (or whatever else) and send pics or notes of where you are. Chance of no signal? Send your planned route.
Also available but I've never tried it, is some Android apps have the emergency photo app. Where you take a photo and it instantly sends it to a chosen number on the emergency band.
I wish it were as easy as riding a bike
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by Steve X »

If you are that worried, buy an Breitling Emergency Watch 2 https://www.ablogtowatch.com/breitling- ... challenge/ as touted by the Patron Saint of Cyclists Jeremy Clarkson
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by thirdcrank »

Depending on your location, you might try firing maroons to summon the RNLI

In other news, here's something touching on what I wrote above about getting out of the car to phone for help
Police have warned people to leave vehicles after a collision following an incident where a car involved in a crash was then hit by an HGV.

The lorry struck a car that had been involved in another crash on the M11 northbound overnight, between junction 10 for Duxford and 11 for Cambridge. .....

The lorry came to a stop on its roof and the section of the M11 will remain closed while the vehicles are recovered.

The police unit, which covers Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, said: "We can't emphasise enough how important it is to get out of your car and stand in a safe place well away from the road.

"This collision would have had a very different outcome if the occupants had stayed in their vehicle."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-c ... e-59028000

(No mention of the long arm of the law doing anything about HGV drivers crashing into things.)
=============================================================
PS Re tracking

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-y ... e-59028764

A lot of themes there, but the image of the searchers' GPS tracks tells a story.

Fingers crossed for a good result.
=================================================================
UPDATE: According to ITV regional news, the body of the missing walker is reported to have been found by a local farmer.
Last edited by thirdcrank on 25 Oct 2021, 6:19pm, edited 1 time in total.
PT1029
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by PT1029 »

Yes, the 999 service can pin point you quite well (in an urban context at least).
A few years ago I called 999 (found a person unconcious on the pavement, no obvious injuries), she asked for the post code (all I could say was on the boundary of OX1 and OX 4, the road was the boundary). Ah I see she said, you are opposite the Bath Store show room.
Spot on..
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by AndyK »

mjr wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 11:49pm
PT1029 wrote: 23 Oct 2021, 12:30pm Might be worth getting We3words on your phone (999 service now use this).
https://what3words.com/products/what3words-app/

It was covered in a thread on this forum at some point.
Yeah, only if you want to send 999 to the wrong end of the county due to misheard homophones or plurals, all while furthering a private commercial attempt to seize control of geolocation. Better to enable Emergency SMS
https://firstaidtrainingcooperative.co. ... -text-999/
Ironically, the page you link to says: "Using the App What3Words is a very easy and useful way to give your location, particularly in rural areas." :-)

I think we also covered this before, but What3Words is quite cleverly designed as far as typos go. If you slightly mis-spell a word, you will get a location that is obviously very wrong - it will be in a different country, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. What's more, as the recipient starts typing the code in on the website, similar-sounding locations are suggested.

Say I'm Brecon Mountain Rescue and I've just had a call for help from what sounded like galleries.desktop.surface. As I type that into W3W, I see that galleries.desktop.surface is in Brittany! That's a bit outside my area. Also there are no mountains in suburban Rennes.

However W3W is also showing me two similar-sounding locations. Could it be gallery.desktop.surface ? No, that's Alaska. galleries.desktops.surface, though, that's "near Brecon, Sir Powys". Click on that and I've got the location, on the path just NE of Cribyn.
screenshot-what3words.com-2021.10.25-20_18_50.png
I'm not saying W3W is problem-free - I also object to its commercial nature and it is heavily orientated towards literate anglophones, but the "misheard word" issue is one they've thought about and mitigated. I challenge you to find another location that sounds a bit like ///galleries.desktops.surfaces and is anywhere within 100 miles of Brecon!
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by mjr »

AndyK wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 8:21pm I'm not saying W3W is problem-free - I also object to its commercial nature and it is heavily orientated towards literate anglophones, but the "misheard word" issue is one they've thought about and mitigated. I challenge you to find another location that sounds a bit like ///galleries.desktops.surfaces and is anywhere within 100 miles of Brecon!
Maybe that one is unaffected but how do you know you haven't got one of another pair like ashes.string.takes and ashes.string.take?

They may have thought about the issue but they do not appear to have avoided it. W3w is unsafe for vital tasks in several ways.
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Re: Using voicemail to record location in emergency

Post by thirdcrank »

I could see potential benefits for the what 3 words thing for using a compatible satnav when the postcode didn't give a sufficiently precise location. eg With a complex of buildings you want the right carpark or delivery bay rather than the letterbox.

Based om my experience of dealing with emergency calls, I can only imagine it adding a layer of potential confusion. Bearing in mind we are discussing mobile phones, IMO the best system would be something based on the IT which uses the location of the phone. The only significant problem I can see is people's reluctance to share this information. When push comes to shove .....

=====================================================

Almost forgot the reluctance of those holding the purse strings to pay for things like this
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