SARCOM

This release is about the record being right — the gear list, the roster's credentials, and the FEMA forms that get read months later. EQUIPMENT The inventory now describes how gear is actually stored. Items nest inside containers, so scanning a trailer returns the cases inside it, the kits in those, and the gear in them. RFID tags and printed serials both scan. A catalog of twelve categories and around 130 item types replaces the old flat list, and dive cylinders record manufacture, visual and hydro dates — with the hydro clock running from manufacture, so a never-tested cylinder reads overdue instead of fine. Gear can be edited mid-callout to mark it grounded. CREDENTIAL EXPIRY Expiry now comes to you. Members get an email at 90, 60, 30 and 7 days and again when a certification lapses; whoever manages credentials for the team gets a single digest. Renewing a certification starts a fresh ladder, so notices about the old term never silence the new one. SATELLITE MESSAGING A composer on Field-Ops builds the message for you: type plainly, pick SMS or inReach, tap what kind of message it is, attach your position. It counts the assembled message rather than what you typed — the prefix and coordinates cost about 38 of your 160 characters before you start — and warns when an emoji or curly quote halves the limit. It also says plainly whether command gets paged. SUBJECTS The lost-person questionnaire now carries the packet's full field set: reporting party, nicknames and code words, address and cell, companions, mental state, fears and phobias, distinguishing marks, and physical description. Identifying, locating, contact and medical fields are encrypted at rest — including the reporting party's, who is usually family and never chose to be in a SAR platform. CHECKLISTS Incident checklists are now your team's own. Every team previously inherited one Alabama team's procedures, agency names and all. You start from a neutral default, and that original list survives as a starter you can fork. DOCUMENTS Search by filename, kind or who filed it, filter and sort, with a live count so a filtered list is never mistaken for missing files. ICS documents filled in on paper or in another agency's system upload alongside — kept distinct from packets SARCOM generated, so the archive says which is which. WHO YOU RESPONDED AS Members of more than one team now pick which team they turned out with, per incident. ICS-211 Agency and ICS-201 Resource Identifier previously listed every team you belong to — columns that get read during reimbursement and after-action review. ICS FORMS • The operational period now prints on the 202, 203 and 204; those boxes were coming out blank • Long names, check-in timestamps and leader contacts stack instead of overrunning their boxes — on continuation pages as well as page one MAPS Map Builder opens on the search area instead of the middle of the country, and CalTopo links land on the incident at working zoom rather than wherever the map was last saved. K9 A deployment can point at the segment drawn in Map Builder, so the card map and the exported PDF agree on where the dog actually worked. OPERATOR GUIDE A written guide to running SARCOM end to end now lives at /instructions, shareable as a link — including with mutual-aid teams. ALSO • Photo uploads raised to 25 MB, so an ordinary phone photo reaches IC • Deleting an event clears its announcement and emails the team • The privacy policy now discloses background location tracking plainly FIXED • Stopping a tracking session no longer leaves unsent GPS points to be posted into your next deployment — that put searchers on ground nobody walked • The alert log no longer disappears behind a profile cover photo