Part 3: Tracker DTS - The Revolution
Tracker DTS was conceived by John “Herf” Hereford, yet another kayaking friend from Boulder Outdoor Center—and an electrical engineer fed up with working at local IBM spinoff, StorageTek.
“I can do better than this thing,” he said during a historic trip to Fowler-Hilliard Hut in 1993, after a frustrating practice session outside the cabin with our analog transceivers. In a real avalanche, there would have been no way any of us could have pinpointed a buried victim using the fragile earplugs and the archaic grid search technique of the time.
Herf left his job at Storagetek and spent the next three years developing “Bernie” (short for St. Bernard), the Tracker’s original name. This started right around the time BCA was being founded, so he developed Tracker DTS while we were launching the Alpine Trekker. Eventually we came to an agreement that when it was finally ready, BCA would be the worldwide distributor. But this was only after a near disaster in January of 1994: While testing Alpine Trekker samples, I got fully buried in an avalanche in Mines 1, a notorious avalanche path at Berthoud Pass (CO). I was rescued by John McGowan (Bruno’s brother and fellow BCA investor) when he scoured the debris and saw my fingertips at the snow surface. It was a good thing he didn’t need to use his transceiver: We had tested them in the parking lot beforehand and both agreed “if we need to use these, we’re fucked.”
I called Herf afterward. “Dude,” I said. “We need to get Bernie to market.”
Several years later, when we finally brought a pre-production unit to Reno for the 1997 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market (with a new name, but a St. Bernard logo still on it) the Tracker DTS was a grand slam home run. Before the real show even started, word got out at the on-snow demo at Boreal Pass (CA). Retailers stood in line to fondle our one working unit. BCA was on the map and our competitors took notice--especially Ortovox, which had 80 percent market share at the time with its F1 Focus analog transceiver.
We knew this product would redefine the category. That’s why we added “DTS” to the name. Short for “Digital Transceiving System,” it was an attempt to create a category name that would redefine transceivers, like GPS for Global Positioning System or ABS for Anti-Lock Brake System. The “DTS” suffix didn’t quite catch on, but the technology itself did—at least on our home turf in the U.S.Europe and Canada were a completely different story.
Disrupting—and revolutionizing—a market takes time, especially for a company that has no reputation or brand recognition. At least in the U.S., some snow safety professionals knew BCA because of our Alpine Trekker. In fact, our first-ever Trekker sale was to veteran Alaska avalanche forecaster, Dave Hamre, who paid me $100 at the 1994 International Snow Science Workshop at Snowbird. Normally, an exhibitor at this bi-annual conference buys an expensive sponsorship for the opportunity to promote products. I walked in and put up a Trekker display without asking. This was the first of many guerrilla marketing moves that would raise hackles in the industry.
In Europe and Canada, however, Tracker sales were frozen by damning reports published by the International Commission on Alpine Rescue (ICAR) and the B.C. Ministry of Highways, respectively. It didn’t help when I stood up on my chair after Nic Seaton of B.C. Highways presented his findings at the 1997 Canadian Avalanche Association annual meeting in Penticton, B.C.:
“We didn’t design this transceiver for you,” I explained brashly. “We designed this for the other 95 percent of the market that doesn’t get paid to practice.” This one comment probably cost us at three years in damage control.
The Canadian guides were not only offended by my comment but were offended that they weren’t included when we were developing the product. In Canadian professional circles, multiple burials are a major concern: the industry is dominated by large heli-skiing operations, including Canadian Mountain Holidays, which carries 11 guests and 1 guide in most of their “ships.” If there’s an incident, it usually involves more than one person—and there’s only one guide to save them. Seaton was able to illustrate how, in a multiple burial, our Special Mode function could cause sometimes cause the searcher to “jump flux lines” and end up back at the victim already located. Of course, with an analog system, we argued, a recreationist couldn’t even find one victim: finding a second one (without turning off the first victim’s beacon) is a luxury.
Interestingly, the European pros at the time could have cared less about multiple burials, perhaps because heli-skiing is almost entirely illegal there. Their concern was receive range. Admittedly, the Tracker DTS had significantly less range than the analog beacons of the time, especially the brick-like Barryvox VS-2000 used by the Swiss military. This unit could pick up a faint signal at 80 meters, as opposed to the maximum of 40 meters or so with Tracker DTS (with optimal antenna alignment). Our argument was that the signal was so weak between 40 and 80 meters when using an analog transceiver that it would actually slow down the searcher. With a Tracker, no signal is a strong signal to keep moving. Then you get a clear distance and directional reading when you get closer, which is much faster than the complicated grid search required by the Barryvox. Eventually this argument made sense, but only after a new generation of freeride-oriented guides and avalanche pros came into the industry there—and in Canada, where a high proportion of older heli guides were Swiss or Austrian.
Despite hang-ups in Canada and Europe, we shipped just over 1,000 Tracker DTS our first season. We easily could have sold three times as many, but Herf was building them himself, one at a time. This was the first year of many—including today--where we haven’t been able to meet demand. Once it became clear this product was legit, Herf outsourced production to a contract manufacturer in Frederick, CO, on the Great Plains just east of Interstate 25.
At this time, we also hired our very first full-time employee, Tiffany Von Essen, who got off to a rough start. First, she had to share her office with me, Bruno, and quite often my infant son, Stu, who would only pass out in his crib between tantrums, feedings, and diaper changes. Second, she was occasionally terrorized when delving into our filing cabinet to fetch records: at my bachelor party held there right after moving in the year before, one of my particularly raunchy friends (name withheld, but he ran the Boulder Outdoor Center kayak school) had brought in a few Hustler magazines, torn out the pages and stuck them randomly in our files. For several years afterward, Tiff would emerge from the file drawer blushing and horrified. She quit a few weeks into the job when Bruno was out of town. I accepted her resignation nonchalantly, but when warmer-and-friendlier Bruno returned, he got her back on board. She became a BCA “franchise player” and stayed with us for another 18 years.