The first of the Cat engine-powered units were built earlier this year and by late spring were in full production. Princeton, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2002, introduced the first Piggy Back lift truck in 1979 and immediately found applications in material handling, agriculture, recycling and other industrial applications. Like all of the Piggy Back models, the new PB50 and PB65 are designed to mount on the rear of a heavy-duty truck during transport, then self-deploy in minutes through use of the company''s Easy Hitch hook mounting system.

Thick smoke surrounding the routers was found not to be an issue, nor was hose-line operations. "With the frequency range this thing is using, you get some signal degradation like you would see from satellites during heavy rain, but that was not a factor in the testing we did," Godfrey says. "That was one of the things we looked at, seeing if this thing worked with multiple hose streams."Potential pitfallsWhile officials are encouraged by early results, a number of issues were exposed. For example, steel buildings were found to distort or inhibit signal clarity. High-rise buildings are another question. The system, which currently operates on a two-dimensional X - Y axis only - there is no Z or elevation axis - has yet to be tested in high-rise fire environments, although communications engineers are now looking at the feasibility of such operations.

Wildfire perimetersGPS is also a new asset for mapping the perimeters of wildfires, but there are problems. Walking the fire line with a GPS unit is too dangerous, and flying the perimeter in a helicopter equipped with GPS or mapping by hand from the air at a safe distance aren''t often feasible. During the initial stages of a wildland fire, helicopters are usually busy with the more critical task of dropping water.The Los Angeles County Fire Department has found a third alternative. It has equipped bulldozers with built-in GPS units, a scheme that''s proved to be valuable because it takes the guesswork out of where a bulldozer line exists. The GPS receivers in these bulldozers have removable PC Type II cards that can be processed with associated mapping software. However, this bulldozer line typically makes up only a part of the fire line, the rest of which must still be mapped by other means.

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