What is the Emergency Services Preferred GPS Coordinate Format?

PS - it's a nice idea that emergency services might standardise coordinate formats but I've been in and around search and rescue organisations enough to know that it will never happen.
But because the above conversion is relatively easy (as long as your GPS allows you to select the format) then you can quickly do it yourself if the need arises.
I teach my teams (some of my work is to provide first aid response teams for remote events) to do the conversions in case they need to supply a different format for an evacuation and once they do it once it's easy.

Yes I do a similar thing with OziExplorer regularily since the waypoint dat a can be in a number of different formats.

Its just that from my experience, with the Police anyway, thier system cannot handle different formats on the fly.

Monitoring the information between the Radio Base & the 'rescue' vehicle, it becomes clear that if the coordinate is not supplied in the right format via 000, then the search is delayed & sometimes the search begins in the wrong area, which can also mean in the wrong command area too.

On one occasion it was up to the search vehicle to get the coordinates & try & work it out themselves...

Its just a bit all to hit & miss, & if I'm in need of help, I want to know in advance that when I ring '000' that my call will be acted on immediately. I'm also guessing that if escalted to a true emergency, then i will be found pretty quickly, as the resorces will be implemented to work out where I am, but in the cases I have heard, it wasn't an emergency, but vehicles were sent immediately to locate these lost people. They spent hours searching in the wrong area.

The other issue is I believe all the police had was a direction finding GPS, i.e. no topographical maps, or even street guidence may have found them since they where on a road in a forest but they didn't know which way was home.

Stormy

"your decent GPS will do any format conversion for you"
- that's right, the technology can do - finding people who know how to use the available technology is the problem.

Another example of people limitations - an experienced operator was asked to send the destination Lat Lon - the navigator queried the destination - why ? The position was received as 35 10.12, but the communications operator read it out as 35 degrees, 10 minutes, 12 seconds - because KNEW that Lat Lon was in Degrees, Minutes, Seconds.

Lesson learnt - send as you received it, OR query the source - DON'T ASSUME.

Yeah. One would hope that but they are not.

This is a pipe dream at this point.

Ambulances in rural Vic are equipped with GPS as part of their radio system. It is a readout only and reads in Degrees, Minutes, Seconds. Few ambulances carry handheld GPSr's and only where local funds have bought them. Only those have the ability to plug in a set of coords to pinpoint a location and I suspect they are used in what ever format the operator is happiest with.

Coords are given to Vic Ambulance Helicopters in that format.

Map references from paper maps are in UTM grid.

Depends on the staff you get on the day as to what level of understanding you get.

I pushed for GPS interpretation and electronic mapping training a few years ago and gave up after the bruise on my forehead got too big.

Dave