One of my best days ever was hiking into an unfamiliar area in a blizzard with the intention of getting lost. I had a survival kit if I needed to spend the night. I didn’t need to go far to get lost. Eventually I found a hunter who clued me into the fact that I hiking parallel to a forestry road.
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I handled one of these in a camping shop in Japan, and chose against it because its size and price didn’t reflect my needs very well - I’m a cycle tourist, so for power on the road, I went for a dynamo hub linked to a Busch and Muller lamp that outputs via USB. I charge an Anker portable battery once my devices are full. For cooking I chose the MSR Whisperlite because of its multi-fuel flexibility.
If you’re interested in options for power on the road or the hiking trail, then cycle touring forums are a good place to check out. Of course, hikers can’t run a dynamo in the same way cyclists can, but there are good discussions of solar set ups as well as stoves like this one.
For phone charging, what you really want to know is the amperage…so I find it a bit sketchy that they don’t specify that explicitly. BioLite’s own product page does give voltage and wattage, though (max continuous: 2W@5V, peak: 4W@5V), and from that we can calculate the amperage as 400-800 milliamps. Most modern smartphones expect at least one full amp; 800mA is equivalent to an old or cheap/generic charger and will be noticeably slow, 400mA will be so slow it’s barely perceptible.
The upshot is that charge speed will be poor at best, depending on how long it can sustain peak output. If the upcoming version you mentioned literally doubles the wattage, it should be much more satisfactory. Either way, the cooking function sounds pretty boss.
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The part of this I particularly enjoyed conceptually is that it’s wood-burning. Carrying and using camp stove fuel - even if you’re car-camping - is annoying, and the wood-burning idea is just fun anyway.
I found a competing product that is simply a camp-stove sized wood-burning stove, here. However, it doesn’t have the fan. The claimed water-boiling time is double what the BioLite one claims. When you’re camping and desperate for coffee, 4.5 vs 8.5 minutes matters.
It seems to me that the fact that it can charge things via USB is merely an afterthought, a gimmick even… the purpose of the generator is really just to power the fan, which I don’t have a problem with as it sounds like it does work quite well.
A cell phone is also an excellent emergency light, assuming you’ve downloaded a flashlight app in advance. (I don’t understand why that function isn’t preloaded on most phones. I like the one included in Power Toggles for Android myself.) My phone’s LED camera flash is the brightest flashlight I’ve ever owned.
There was a viral story a few years back about a hiker who’d gotten himself lost for long enough that they sent out search planes. His flashlight was dead, but he was able to signal the plane with his iPhone light. Saved his life, apparently.
If someone then pointed to your pager and asked “Is that some sort of telephone?” and you replied “More or less”, that would be a perfectly acceptable and accurate answer.
It gets the basic concept across. It’s certainly a heck of a lot more imformative than just saying “It’s a pager”, if the person has no clue what a pager is. And of course, if necessary, you can easily go on explain that it only works one way.
So why not explain that a PLB or EPIRB is technically a one-way satellite pager? Because that’s not the important point of consideration in what I was talking about in the first place.
I was remarking that a satellite phone seemed more appropriate for hiking safety than a cell phone, because the basic technology on which the devices operate is fundamentally different - a cell phone requires a nearby cell tower and can be impeded by local terrain, whereas a satellite phone merely needs a reasonably clear line of sight to overhead satellites.
I then learned about PLBs and EPIRBs without real context when someone mentioned them, but didn’t explain them at all, leaving me to research them, and then sum up my findings for other readers who (like me) were unfamiliar with and confused by the strange acronyms.
They are basically satphones. True, they don’t allow two-way phone calls, but since the original context was my suggestion of satphones over cell phones, that wasn’t important - delivering the basic concept of what a “PLB” and an “EPIRB” are and how they fundamentally operate to other readers was.
I own one of these too! It’s super fun to use!
[quote=“Glitch, post:28, topic:36714”]If someone then pointed to your pager and asked “Is that some sort of telephone?” and you replied “More or less”, that would be a perfectly acceptable and accurate answer. It gets the basic concept across.
[/quote]
What? No it doesn’t. Not in any meaningful way. It might technically operate in the same way as a cell phone makes phone calls, but that is emphatically not how it is used. Bear in mind what I actually wrote: “you’ve introduced your own bit of ambiguity here.” I didn’t say what you wrote was technically - at an engineering and design level - wrong. I said it was ambiguous, especially so at the user level. Big difference.
An EPIRB might transmit data in the same way a sat-phone makes a call, but someone’s going to be pretty freaking annoyed to find that the device they hauled along on a tramp won’t make voice calls like some dude on BoingBoing said it would.
True, they don’t allow two-way phone calls, but since the original context was my suggestion of satphones over cell phones, that wasn’t important - delivering the basic concept of what a “PLB” and an “EPIRB” are and how they fundamentally operate to other readers was.
‘How they fundamentally operate’ is irrelevant since that is not information that I, you, or anyone else can use in the middle of the bush. All you need to know is that it’ll let the outside know where you are in an emergency, from anywhere, including outside of cellphone coverage.
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If you go hiking and base the entirety of your knowledge of the life saving rescue equipment that you bought and brought with you for your own safety on what “some dude on BoingBoing said”, you’ve got to be some special kind of stupid.
Anyone who actually cares enough to go hiking with one of these devices is going to seek out more information. I wasn’t posting for their benefit. I was posting for the benefit of those who simply didn’t know what the heck a random acronym like “PLB” mentioned with zero context was.
You’re just inventing straw men, at this point. If you really cared about “ambiguity”, you’d be getting on the case of the person who originally brought up PLBs and EPIRBs with absolutely no explanation whatsoever, as if people would just know what those acronyms mean.
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Why is it every time there is a post about something “outdoors” related we get a bunch of self righteous prattle about what “responsible” hikers, climbers, rescuers, etc. should be doing? The post was about a stove and we’re already off in “I need a personal locator beacon to save my damn ass” land.
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The discussion went along the following lines:
- Why would you need a stove that charges gadgets? Why have gadgets while hiking?
- Gadgets are useful as safety devices, examples being a GPS or cell phone.
- Argument made that cell phones shouldn’t be relied on while hiking, because they have poor coverage. Take a radio or satphone instead.
- Mention of PLBs and EPIRBs.
- Explanation of what those actually are.
- Disagreement on whether PLBs and EPIRBs are, in fact, “essentially satphones”.
Up until about step six, none of that was really all that odd.
There is actually a pot with a TEG in the base for charging purposes, though not as efficient for heating water as the super awesome Thermette. You are more easily able to transmit heat energy through a Seebeck generator by dumping heat from the fire into water it is also a great medium to prevent overheating as long as you don’t let the pot run dry.
For power generation though a long burning appliance like a pressure kerosene lantern makes more sense than a cook stove, though with a modified cook top boiling water heat sink.
(edit)
PLBs and EPIRBs operate on 406 MHz and transmit a digital ID, satellites with the COSPAS or SARSAT strap on modules monitor this freq and can tightly locate a signal in about 10min by computing orbital mechanics and Doppler frequency shift, registration means that the emergency centers can call your house or emergency contact to see what the story is. The old 121.5Mhz air band warblers ELTs and EPIRBs are trackable in a few sat passes but the frequency is no longer actively monitored, the one useful thing is if you buy a small air band radio for emergencies(permissible for emergency comms ONLY) you can usually get an airliner within a few minutes nearly anywhere in the world who can relay a distress call and rescue aircraft can direction find that air band frequency and 406 MHz. Best would be a 406 MHz EPIRB with 121.5MHz voice comms, have not see that in any pilot stuff shop yet though there is a very expensive Breitiling watch with a 406 MHz EPIRB if you feel like James Bond. There are some tracker - distress gadgets which send an I’m-safe or emergency SMS via one of the sat-phone networks though not as reliable as a real EPIRB and requiring annual or monthly service fees.
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These things are silly toys. If you’re going on a trip long enough to need to recharge your phone/gps, it’s size and weight is prohibitive (about twice as large, and five times as heavy as a rocket stove) and there’s a high likelihood that you’re someplace where you won’t get cell phone service. And on short trips, maybe something overnight, what would you run out of power doing?
And anyone who’s worried enough about emergencies while backpacking that they think they need to keep phone/GPS/locators AND the ability to recharge them… but has no problem carrying a wood stove over a gas stove, isn’t thinking things through. Needing to repeatedly collect dry wood to have a fire is a lot bigger safety issue than not having the ability to recharge a dead piece of technology.
And purely as a wood stove, they’re no more efficient than any simple rocket stove, which does the same thing this thing does with it’s complicated and heavy fan/battery setup, but does it passively. They also cost a heck of a lot less.
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I understand the progression here. That may be the case for this one thread, but I was making a comment about several threads on BB regarding outdoor activities. From the Alex Honnold free-soloing thread to the recent one about the cliffed out hiker. In all of them there is a lot of judgement thrown around. That is my main objection.
I personally find that any physically rigorous hobby activity, from outdooring to weight lifting to playing sports and countless others, tends to attract a lot of people who all agree on the basic fundamentals of the activity, but who violently and clannishly oppose each other regarding the exact way in which to engage in said activity.
Hikers will argue over what the “right” equipment to take on a hike is, even though the vast majority of it comes down to individual needs and preferences that vary from situation to situation. They’ll argue over where to hike, when to hike, what order to hike a set of trails in, how quickly you should hike, and whatever else you can think of other than the basic concept of hiking being an enjoyable, healthy outdoor activity.
Weightlifters are much the same. They argue over what equipment to use, how much weight to lift, how many reps to run through, when to rest, how to rest, how long to rest, when to exercise which muscles, in what order, and so on and so on and so on. They all agree that lifting weights will make you stronger, but they all believe that only their preferred way of going about doing that weight-lifting is “right”, and that anyone who does things differently for any reason isn’t a proverbial “True Scotsman”.
The same actually probably applies to every hobby to some extent or another, regardless of physical exertion. As I mentioned recently in another thread, “XKCD Is Always Relevant”.
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Well, um, good for you?
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What did you expect? That I could somehow rationally explain why people behave irrationally?
I’m afraid all I have to offer you is commiseration. If that’s of no use to you, oh well.
I wonder whether a spare battery is an option.
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[quote=“Glitch, post:37, topic:36714”]
The same actually probably applies to every hobby to some extent or another, regardless of physical exertion.
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[quote=“smut_clyde, post:40, topic:36714”]
I wonder whether a spare battery is an option.
[/quote]It’s probably the best option for someone who’s backpacking. The newer chargers will fill a phone or camera several times. And does it sitting in your pack, rather than while you tend a tiny little fire for 10 hours. And the charger plus a little lightweight backpacking stove will be lighter and cheaper than the Biolite.
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