Poppa Clay wrote:
As a CPR instructor I alway tell my students that when calling 911 give your location. That includes state, city, park etc. That way in the event that you do get the wrong 911 operator who is located somewhere else they can put you in contact or they can contact the correct 911 service.
If boondocking I would think that it would be a good idea to note your gps coordinates in the event that you need to pass them on to 911 operator. This would be extreamly handy if you or someone else were hurt while outr hiking or if you become lost.
If you have your GPS coordinates, passing them on is probably a good thing to do, but if you can get a gps signal, the phone will more than likely also pick up GPS anyway and by regulation the phones GPS coordinates WILL be given to 911 regardless of what defaults you have your phone set to. The only exception would be if for some reason the 911 center can't see/log the phones GPS data, which by now should be very very rare. For at least 5 years phones have had to have a way to accurately locate the caller, and 911 centers have had to be able to be set up to view that info. The solution adopted by most,if not all carriers, is to include a GPS chip in the phone. Triangulation from towers isn't reliable enough, in remote areas, you may only be able to contact one tower.
Since there are several ways lat. and long. are shown on GPS units, it may just confuse the 911 center if the info you give is NOT in the same format as the phones. (I'm assuming the phones are required to follow one std) there is degrees, minutes, seconds, and degrees, followed by another format. And I've seen units that don't always show location with +/- from 180 degrees, ignoring the sign could get you half the world wrong!.
So, If I call 911 I'm going to not pass on GPS coordinates unless asked, just ask them if they have my GPS coordinates. If I'm out of my local area, I would give them my geographic location as best I could in case I'm connected to a non local center.
In once case we needed to call about an emergency in another state. Received a call and we needed to make sure the callers local emergency services knew about the emergency. We simply dialed 1, area code of the location we wanted, followed by 911. explaining the situation, the 911 call center connected us to the city where the emergency was and they then handled it. Don't know if this would work in all cases.