CalTopo First Response/Teams Resources to share
This is a community board for you, the First Responders of CalTopo, to share resources that you have found helpful. Or resources that you have made yourselves that others may find useful.
Please feel free to link to external sources, resources that CalTopo has provided, resources in other languages etc.
If possible, providing a brief description of the resource and what it may help users accomplish will be very helpful.
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CalTopo Team Account training videos on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/showcase/10358542
These are specific to our Teams Accounts, but go through setting up your account, to tips and tricks for advanced use. With any specific questions email us at help@caltopo.com
For anyone in SAR who needs comprehensive paper or electronic form based ICS documentation to go with your maps, check out SARAssist.
This FREE (no strings attached) application is purpose built by and for SAR Professionals and works hand in hand with CalTopo.
SARAssist is an Incident Management application. It can be used as a single or multiuser application, synchronized across a local network, the internet or both.
SARAssist has been designed to work with CALTopo. In task assignments you can include links to maps which can be automatically included into printed briefings. In creating task assignments, we first graphically design them in CALTopo, using as many data fields as possible or desired. A handy trick here is that CALTopo clones information entered on the first assignment onto the subsequent ones. So creating similar types of assignments is really quick. Assignment letters coincide with segments defined on the map as polygons. This is valuable because SARAssist can use the segments to perform a Mattson analysis. We then export the map as a Geojson file and import the file into SARAssist. From there, SARAssist generates each of the assignments previously created in CALTopo, populating the info entered earlier including coordinates for the search areas.
When the import is complete we can use SARAssist to assign teams and resources and print task assignments and other reports. These are created as PDF files on standard ICS forms. This approach helps us to create more detailed and consistent maps, while accelerating our other documentation processes. It eliminates a great deal of duplicate data entry and gives our reports more consistent detail.
SARAssist includes dashboards for Operations, Planning, Logistics, Member Status, Comms log and more. It handles member and resource check in and check out, and is highly customizable as far as defaults go. If you have read this far you owe it to yourself to check out SARAssist.
CALTopo is an essential tool in our kit for SAR in BC. Being able to track our teams in real time is a game changer. In our jurisdiction we are required to have a great deal of documentation, in addition to detailed maps. This makes SARAssist a great companion to work in conjunction with CALTopo.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, there is a companion app, MySARAssist available for Android and iOS devices. This is designed to provide the SAR team member with useful tools. Among these is a detailed RADeMS calculator and it supports digital check-in and check-out at the command post, populating SARAssist with your current qualifications and personal information with one beep of a scanner. This saves an enormous amount of data entry, especially in mutual aid situations, and allows Planning and Operations to get members on task faster.
Both SARAssist and MySARAssist are FREE. Not often you can say that.
I have been working an a google sheet to accomplish this. SAR Assist has made over 14 months of work obsolete because it is SOOO good! I am so happy to have found this tool. I will be showing it to all my teams and I hope to get them all on board. one of my gripes about all the other software out there is it either needed a subscription, required internet to function, or was very poor (or all three). SAR Assist is going to be a game changer.
Looking at the further integration - work is underway to integrate SARTopo and SAR Command Assist so both the mapping and detailed IAPs / Comms log etc are managed between the two products.
At the moment when you:
1) Create an assignment in SARTopo it will download it to SAR Command Assist to allow you to build more detailed forms / track who is on the assignment etc for resource status tracking.
2) Automatically create folders by operational period according to a template when sync'd to the map helping standardize response structure.
Very much early beta development at this time, there is a discord server of users / developers on the app at https://discord.gg/yaEFDG37 that might be of use to some folks.
Really excited to see where further integrations will make managing incidents a lot easier!
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