Part 4: The Beacon Wars
Within three years of our big launch, Tracker DTS had taken over the U.S. market. And it was gaining traction in Europe, touching off some heated competition that later became known by industry insiders as the “Beacon Wars.” In Europe, our dirtbag snowboarding Swiss distributors, Michi Wyser and Reto Tischauser, had tapped into the emerging freeride market, but were still fighting the Swiss establishment and their damning ICAR report. They turned the tide with a computer simulation called “TrackSim” that calculated the overall search time of the Tracker DTS versus the Barryvox VS-2000 and other analog transceivers. The simulation convinced many Swiss pros that no signal during the signal search and a clear signal during the coarse search was actually faster than a weak signal at greater range—and then having to walk in a grid pattern during the coarse search.
Meanwhile, in Austria, a sales rep for our Salzburg-based distributor saw the light and became our biggest evangelist on the continent. An aging IFMGA mountain guide, Franz Hohensinn, ditched his guiding job and his repping job at Bergsport Kaufmann and hit the road full-time for BCA. He put Trackers in the hands of every backcountry rider in Austria that he could find. A few years later, we were outselling Pieps in their home country. In fact, Pieps disappeared from the market and were missing in action for several years between Tracker’s introduction and 2004. Everyone thought they were gone. But in 2004, they re-emerged with the Pieps DSP, our first legitimate competitor with a digital system. This spelled the end of analog transceivers in Europe. Ortovox followed eventually, after many years of resistance (“we will NEVER abandon the analog, single-antenna transceiver,” Ortovox founder Gerald Kampel declared at a conference in 1997). Arva came out with a digital transceiver around the same time as BCA, but for some reason, they have never made significant inroads outside their home country of France.
It would take seven years for us to come out with our next transceiver, the Tracker2. By this time, Bruno had negotiated the acquisition of Herf’s sole proprietorship, Rescue Technology, and moved production of Tracker DTS to BCA headquarters in Boulder, with the main subassemblies coming from Asia. Our Colorado-based contract manufacturer simply couldn’t keep up, especially considering the extremely seasonal nature of our business. Development of T2 was painstaking. Herf had resisted incorporating a third antenna into the design, insisting he could accomplish the same goal using software instead of hardware. This cost us several years and enabled some of our competitors to regain their foothold in Europe.
A third antenna cleans up the fine search (bracketing) process in the last three meters of the search, eliminating subtle “null” or “spike” readings caused by complicated antenna orientation issues at close range. Contrary to popular belief, the third antenna was originally developed, not by Pieps, but by a Swiss company, Girsberger Electronik, for use in their large-scale helicopter mounted antenna for search-and-rescue operations. Incredibly, managers at Pieps weren’t aware of this when they threatened BCA with a lawsuit. Case dismissed.
While Herf and BCA held broad U.S. and Canadian patents for a “digital avalanche transceiver with distance and direction display,” we did not have a patent in Europe. But our North American market share was so commanding for the next two decades, we never enforced them. Besides, we thought it would create bad “karma” in our industry, where the primary mission is to save lives. But this was not enough to stave off the “Beacon Wars.”
The devastating toll Tracker DTS took on our competitors’ market share created some intense public confrontations, which not-so-affectionately became known in professional circles as the Beacon Wars. U.S. distributor Marcus Peterson, a salty New Englander and diehard Patriots fan, was just as livid as founder Gerald Kampel about their loss of global market share. The first shot was fired by Kampel at the1998 International Snow Science Workshop (ISSW) in Sunriver, OR. Another heavily-witnessed shot was fired by Peterson at the 2008 ISSW at Squaw Valley, CA.
“Edgerly, we’re going to bury you and your company with this thing,” Peterson announced in the presence of hundreds of industry leaders at the well-attended conference, his confidence elevated by the recent introduction of the (since discontinued) Ortovox S1. Other confrontations have occurred since then between BCA and Mammut’s quirky knowledge leader, Manuel Genswein, a trainer of the Swiss military and Canadian guiding industry. But the Beacon Wars appear to have subsided over the past decade, as all the original founders (including BCA’s) have sold to corporations and no longer truly have their skin in the game.
Tracker3, Tracker4, and Tracker S followed in the footsteps of Tracker DTS and the Beacon Wars. While the third antenna and multiple burial “marking” and “suppression” functions have become industry standards, transceiver design has mainly stabilized across all brands. The development of digital transceiver technology remains the biggest breakthrough in the snow safety industry since the first Skadi “Hot Dog” was introduced by pioneer John Lawton in 1971. And like Apple’s Macintosh and Nike’s Waffle Trainers, Tracker DTS would put our company on the map forever—okay, on a slightly smaller scale.