Unexcused Absences

It’s nice to have clever friends. It’s really nice when those clever friends invent something cool and then let you play with it.

Before Christmas, our friends at BriarTek offer us the chance to put the new Cerberus, a truly worldwide messaging and tracking system, through its paces just prior to its release. Since it uses both the mobile phone network and satellites for communication, you never need be unreachable. It has quite a few different features, which you can configure depending on how you want to use the device.

Globetrotting with Cerberus – We Arrive Unexpectedly in London

-Cerberus can track you anywhere in the world. For those adventurous folks who travel off the beaten track, it’s a way to let folks know where you are — if you want to share that information.

-Cerberus can warn you if there are ‘issues’ nearby, e.g., riots, hurricanes, volcanoes, revolutions, wars, ebola, etc.

-Cerberus can send and receive messages anywhere. While you might be perfectly safe and content while out on your wilderness jaunt, sometimes emergencies arise back at home. It took some friends who were abroad on 9-11 days to learn their families were safe.

-Most importantly, Cerberus allows you to send an SOS from anywhere on earth, alerting local authorities to your plight. Not only that, you can communicate with the authorities, for example, describing the severity/extent of injuries to better assist rescue personnel.

Summer View of the Slopes with Kent’s Winter Tracks

We have the most fun with the tracking features. After receiving the unit, we turn on the ‘breadcrumb’ feature (which we configure to note our location every 20 minutes or so) while we finish our errands around town. The next morning, we fly to Beaver Creek for the Birds of Prey World Cup alpine ski races. On several occasions, Kent clips the unit to his backpack as he works the course during the races. As you can see from the tracks, he has no fun whatsoever — Kent stays strictly on the race course during the event!

For those who want their family to know where they are, it’s possible to set up a public map which shows all of your latest breadcrumbs. Our family was VERY surprised (as were we) to learn we were in London during our very bad, two-day journey to South Africa. In fact, you can see where we tag our London breadcrumb on the world map at the start of this post.

Dropping Breadcrumbs in Kruger

While in South Africa, we drop lots of breadcrumbs around Kruger National Park as soon as we spot a new animal. By dropping a manual breadcrumb, we add text to our location noting what we see! We even use the satellite messaging system to diagnose Jessica’s camera ills when outside the reach of the park’s mobile phone network.

Fortunately, we never need to use the SOS system and the countries we visit remain stable, healthy and have normal weather during our visit. Unfortunately, we have to return the fun, new gadget back to its rightful owners.

But should we need the gadget in the future, here’s the most unique feature (in my opinion) of the product; while many satellite tracking and messaging systems require you to pay hundreds of dollars for a device you may only use a few times, Briartek will actually rent you a unit for a few weeks at a time. It’s a perfect solution for occasional and budget conscious adventurers like us!