When a friend is detected, SnoWhere adds a pin to the map.

 

Victims are green; searchers are red.

Tap the pin to see the friend’s name and how far away they are.

SnoWhere shows you where you’ve already searched as a track on the map.

 

A red track shows where you’ve already searched and no friends were found.

The track changes to green when friends are detected.

GPS location accuracy depends on many things, e.g. weather, snow depth, density and moisture, even iPhone™ model.

 

SnoWhere shows location accuracy using dotted circles; yours in blue, your friend’s in green (or red if your friend is searching).

Seeing location accuracy helps you decide whether you’re in the right place.

Signal strength display lets you see how far apart iPhones are with much greater accuracy than GPS.

Tap the pin to start showing your friend’s signal strength when searching, which helps you home in with greater accuracy.

Tap the pin again to hide the name display and stop showing signal strength.

 

When searching, SnoWhere uses different sounds to indicate:

When you’ve found a friend

How far away any found friends are

When a friend has joined the search

When no friends are nearby

This lets you concentrate on covering the search area safely and quickly because you can look at the terrain and for your friends, not your iPhone™.

If a second slide happens while you’re searching for friends, you could be trapped yourself.

SnoWhere automatically switches back to transmit if you haven’t moved for 5 minutes, so that other rescuers can search for you too.

Before you head out into the mountains, it’s important to make sure you know the local emergency contact details.

 
SnoWhere prompts you to create a Snow SOS contact, to remind you to find out your local patrol contact details before you go out.

When you need help emergency services can find your location using phone network masts; the accuracy of that location depends on the distance between masts. Cities have many masts close together, which works quite well. There are fewer masts much further apart in the mountains, which reduces accuracy. Using the phone network to find you in the mountains could mean that help takes longer to get to you.

 
SnoWhere can help by creating a Mail or SMS with your precise GPS location to send to your Snow SOS contact to ask for help. You can add details about what has happened before the message is sent.

 

SnoWhere can play a sound on a friend’s iPhone™ to help confirm that you’ve found the right spot.

You can mark friends already found, so you don’t waste search time finding their iPhone™ to turn SnoWhere off.

Friends can search together. SnoWhere automatically links searching iPhones, showing you where other searchers are and any friends they have found. This helps you cover a wider area more quickly, because shorter search time helps save lives.