To El Rog:
If you read the full Sandia Test Report yourself, you'll see that the conclusions as stated in the Abstract in the beginning, contradict the actual test results themselves. The DKL device made all 25 of the 25 detections in the test, and it says so in the report. They didn't count 19 of the 25 tests because they were off directionally by a few degrees. DKL however, has always said that the accuracy of the bearing varies depending on the distance and the obstacles between the operator & the target. If you were tracking a fugitive in the woods, the device will point you in the general direction of the target, and the bearing will harden up the closer you get to him. Clearly you're better off searching a 5 to 10 degree sector of the woods than a 180 degree sector. Search and Rescue personnel have tested it in a variety of different scenarios, and in each case, the device has dramatically cut down their search time. You can read the original report by Sandia yourself, (it's not that long) and you can find it online at:
http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/acces...998/980977.pdf
Dramatically new technologies, that defy the common wisdom of the day, often are met with disbelief, and beset by detractors who refuse to believe that they're capable of meeting their maker's claims. Read the report, and contact the company to arrange for a personal demonstration. Once you see it work, and actually operate it yourself as I have, you'll be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is indeed real.
There are numerous different uses for this technology, other than locating our enemies in military scenarios, in which lives can be saved. Searching for survivors in earthquake rubble, locating survivors in burning buildings, locating individuals afloat after boating accidents etc, finding missing skiers after an avalanche, all become much easier with this technology. With so much at stake, isn't it worth your time to look into it on your own rather than assuming that a testing lab like Sandia cannot make mistakes? Hundreds of these units are in use around the world, and have already saved many many lives.
I don't know too much about the other device you're talking about, but the DKL device has no removable cards, DKL has never claimed that it works at distances of 12km. The maximum operational range that DKL has ever claimed is 500 meters. There have been other devices that claimed to be able to locate people (as well as explosives & drugs) that have been proven to be fraudulent. Two of these, the Quadro Tracker and the ADE651, both of which resemble the DKL devices, are discussed in the following article at a well known website, the Skeptic's Dictionary:
http://skepdic.com/quadro.html.
The more recent of the two, the ADE651 is the subject of the following report from the BBC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQMwX...yer_embedded#!
To: Papa Zero Three
I'm virtually certain that you're confusing the DKL LifeGuard with the ADE651. The operator during the Sandia test was a fully trained DKL representative. The ADE651, which sells for $40,000 each, was sold to various military forces. The Iraqi's bought thousands of them at a cost of $85MM.
To: plato
I don't doubt that you're a good engineer, but unless you're really familiar with the science of dielectrophoresis, you can't truly understand how the DKL device works. In any event, your conclusion is wrong. The operator's electric field is part of the circuit that occurs when the device locks onto its target. I wish I could be more specific, but the operator's field in some way attracts the target's field. I'm not an engineer myself, so I can't explain the science too well, however your analogy is totally off base:
"It's sorta like standing in the middle of a football field, blind, and picking up the heartbeat of someone with a red shirt, as opposed to every one else".
That's not what DKL is claiming the LifeGuard can do. It cannot locate one specific person, regardless of any specific characteristic of that individual person out of a crowd of other people. It can however find an individual such as a lost hiker out in the wilderness. The hardest thing for the device to do is locate people in crowded urban environments, because the device is so sensitive, that it can easily pick up others in the search area. The "RAD" (Range Attenuation Device) that sticks out of the front of the LifeGuard (and looks like a car antenna) can be shortened or lengthened in order to adjust the unit's range of detection. If you were looking for a living survivor in a house on fire, you'd have to shorten the RAD so its range is only slightly more than the distance from the operator to a short distance behind the house. If used with the RAD fully extended, and if there were individuals in another house behind the house you're scanning (within a few hundred meters), the unit would pick them up, whether there were or were not survivors in the house being scanned. The company claims that the unit does generate roughly 5% false positives in many scenarios, however in numerous tests, where there were some false positives, the device has NEVER failed to make a detection if a living target was present.
The following is a quote from an article in Law Enforcement Technology Magazine, (March 2007) which can be found online at:
http://www.officer.com/print/Law-Enf...y-Hide/1$35704
"Montanio recalls his first field application of the system. He received a call on Easter night from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department requesting assistance at a scene where a suspect had taken hostages and barricaded himself inside a City of Industry residence. Officials wanted Montanio to use the LifeGuard system to determine where people were located within the home, in case they had to do a rescue entry.
He recalls deploying the system on all sides of the home and getting two detections, one in the dwelling's center and the other in its northeast corner. When the suspect surrendered and SWAT officers entered, they found the subject and hostages holed up in the center of the home while a baby slept in a bedroom in the northeast corner.
In another incident, as undercover officers made a methamphetamine buy in south Los Angeles, the suspect took off running into a large warehouse. Montanio says he was able to use the LifeGuard to narrow the suspect's location to a small corner of the warehouse. K-9 officers located the suspect hidden in a locker near where Montanio had made the detection."
I suspect that a number of people have simply assumed the DKL device is just another iteration of bogus devices like the Quadro Tracker and the ADE651. It's not. The company is run by two retired Naval officers with impeccable reputations. As a former Marine myself, I hate to think of all the American lives that have been lost in the middle east in recent years, that could have been saved, if the DKL device was widely deployed by our military. When I first saw the device working, my immediate thought was how many lives could have been saved if these devices were in use in the late 60's in Vietnam. Enemy ambushes at jungle extraction points would have been impossible if the crew chief in the Hueys could have scanned a potential LZ from the air before setting down.
I'm certain that everyone reading this knows how valuable a tool this device can be if it does in fact do what the company says it can. For 12 years now, the company has been trying to overcome the negative publicity caused by the Sandia report. All it's asking for is a chance to demo their technology for anyone who's willing to look at it with an open mind and judge for themselves if it's real or not.
I've used it myself, and I swear that it's 100% legit.
atmhc