This article discusses how high-tech solutions have failed in searches for missing airplanes: http://www.pe.com/localnews/sbcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_S_sar10.46ac6aa.html
At the bottom is this:
QuoteSome progress has been made, he said, and NASA is developing a satellite system to ferret out crash-beacon signals and relay them to search headquarters.
The Distress Alerting Satellite System would relay the location of a crash faster and more accurately than the search-and-rescue satellite system currently in use, he said.
"The receivers are going to be on board Global Positioning System satellites and immediately re-transmit the (crash-beacon) signals back down to ground stations ... around the world," Dreibelbis said. "The bottom line is in about five minutes, the rescue coordination center will have the alert and its location ... within five nautical miles versus 20 nautical miles now.
Don't recall hearing about a whole new system for ELT alerts.
River, man, you have to keep up with the times.
The Distress Alerting Satellite System (DASS) is in the proof-of-concept (POC) phase. Packages are already installed on 9 GPS Block IIR sats and 12 more are planned. The operational system is planned for the Block III GPS sats. The first ground POC station is at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center and the plan is to build a second in Hawaii this fiscal year.
The DASS link at NASA.
http://searchandrescue.gsfc.nasa.gov/dass/index.html
DASS will be part of the Medium Earth Orbiting SAR (MEOSAR) system. The current Sarsat packages on weather satellites in lower orbits are the LEOSAR system and the geostationary sats are the GEOSAR system.
Mike
That sounds promising: now, the funding will likely become an issue. Interesting, this system will only report on 406 beacons: no mention of 121.5 or 243.
The GA community had better pay close attention to this issue before we start having GA aircraft crews lost because nobody is paying attention to the problem. I know that some of the government agencies are putting out warnings to this effect and encouraging aircraft owners to upgrade to 406 ELTs: I picked up a poster at the AOPA Expo last week and posted it at my local airport.