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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Makes me think that there is potential of repurposing military smokescreen technology for emergency gear.

Single-use flares/smoke generators are nice if you are sure you will be spotted during that specific fly-through by rescue team. If not, you need to pack some amount with you. You need to be sure they don't 'expire' and don't get wet.

What about some emergency signal mirrors with pinhole? It can be plastic so nearly indestructible, weights few grams, basically credit-card size, cost nothing, due to pinhole you can point the sun reflection pretty precisely towards rescuers and it doesn't run out.

Drawback is obviously inefficiency without direct sunlight, but this is something I carry on every camping trip and I don't even think about it anymore.

That is cool if you are in fairly open high country. But these guys had climbed into the canopy of a tree, so both the sunlight, and the reflected light from the mirror could have been blocked by foliage. Smoke (or a flare) was about the only thing that could move above the treeline and be visible to an aircraft.

Seems simpler to have some sort of radio beacon.

When going on remote motorbike road trips (eg outback Australia), the general thing we take is a satellite phone. They're fairly cheap to hire.

Which would you recommend? Id happily carry a credit card sized radio beacon in addition to my emergency reflector.

Not OP, but I know the Spot products are pretty popular (https://www.findmespot.com/en/). Though, the Gen3 is quite a bit thicker than a credit card and they do run $20/month for service.

But, they're designed for exactly this.

I have a Fastfind PLB as my primary (doesnt need a subscription, but one-time use), but I'm interested in this CC-sized device OP mentioned as an every-day carry.

In a very 2019 move, military smokescreen has in fact been repurposed for the civilian market... for social media use: https://www.google.com/search?q=photorealistic+smoke+effect

They’re also heavily used in paintball and airsoft, and some other quasi-combat games. The best ones I’ve used are sold by a company called Enola Gay, and they advertise simultaneously to photographers (as you said) and paintball/airsoft users. They’re really fun, ring-pull devices and produce a truly impressive amount of smoke for minutes at a time. The first time I used one I giggled like a kid.

They’ve always been available to civilians as smoke markers.

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