Tweeters,

Recent postings on birdchat indicate that wildlife beacons operate on 5
frequency bands totalling over 38 MHz. Most are shared with other radio
usage. Presumably, most wildlife transmitters achieve a reasonably long
battery life by 1) operating at very low power & 2) transmitting a burst,
dead period, burst, ... sequence. Common scanners usually miss weak
intermittent signals mixed with continuous signals. Admittedly, poachers
could guess the band, if they saw the legitimate user's antenna. That
would still require considerable hand tuning to find the exact frequency.
Alternatively, there's digging the frequency out of the so-called public
record. Either suggests rather sophisticated poachers. I understand that
even given receivers optimized for the signal they're tracking, the FRG
often looses their target. I've read that couger trackers sometimes can't
find the couger even when they have a strong radio signal. Wouldn't it be
easier for poachers to find a condor the same way we find a rare bird?
Very easy to blame the technology for loss of the condors while we don't
actually know what happened. I'm not saying the radios do the condors
any good. But, has anybody shown they do any harm?

Steven S. Coles
Seattle, Washington State, U.S.A.
<scoles at zebu.serv.net>