This started off as a commment on sharris0512's diary but I thought more people would see it as a diary.
I love to hike and I've taken several wilderness survival courses so I followed the story of the Kim family with great interest. Thanks to his status as a senior editor at Cnet, Kim had an army of techies over at Digg and elsewhere sleuthing on his behalf.
But it was a cell phone engineer in Bend, Oregon named Eric Fuqua and co-workers at Edge Wireless who were instrumental in locating the surviving members of the Kim family. After I read a little about it, I found the story that explained the work that Fuqua and his co-workers did, which follows. I've also added a contact link where you can send Fuqua, Pugsley, and Edge Wireless some love...
...The key to finding them, police said, was a "ping" from one of the family's cell phones that helped narrow down their location. Though cell phone signals are rare in the area, reports CBS News correspondent Blackstone, the family's phone connected briefly to a distant tower as it received a text message. That gave searchers a place to look.
According to one of two cell phone engineers who honed in on the Kims, the chance of the split-second signal making it through the rugged mountains was "very slim."
"It was just a hunch that we could help. And we followed up on the hunch," said Eric Fuqua, 39, an engineer for Edge Wireless LLC who contacted authorities to offer his services in the search. Edge Wireless provides cell phone coverage in southern Oregon, and is a member of Cingular Wireless' network.
Fuqua and co-worker Noah Pugsley started digging through computer records of cell phone traffic Saturday and learned that one of the Kims' cell phones had received two text messages around 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, the day after the family was last seen at a restaurant in Roseburg, Ore.
The engineers were able to trace a "ping" from the Kims' phone when it received the text messages. They located not only the cell tower in Glendale, Ore., from which the messages were relayed, but a specific area west of the town where the phone received them.
With the family's possible location narrowed down, the pair used computer software to create a map predicting what parts of the mountainous region received any cell phone coverage at all.
Fuqua then relied on his extensive experience traveling the heavily forested back roads as both a fisherman and a technician, he said, to guess the course the family may have taken as they headed from the mountains toward the coast.
The engineers' sleuthing led searchers to focus on Bear Camp Road.
Kati Kim and her daughters were found with their snowbound car just off that road, which Fuqua called "impossible" terrain to navigate for anyone with no knowledge of the area...
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Isn't it good to know that in a time when most of us feel that we can't depend on our government to help us, i.e. post-Katrina, there's selfless folks out there who are willing to drop everything, knuckle down and provide their expertise where it is most needed?
And here's the link where you can send Eric and his co-workers some love:
http://www.edgewireless.com/...