I carry an LED flashlight wherever I go. To some people that seems extreme or even silly, but if they tried it I suspect they’d think differently. Just about every conceivable task is a whole lot easier if you can just see clearly, and modern indoor life is full of dark crannies that need to be accessed. I use the flashlight I carry just about every day, often several times a day.
Then there’s the Metro (subway). I’ve been down there a couple of times when things have not gone well (one I’ve written about here, I refuse to go into miles and miles of underground tunnels passing beneath prime terror targets with the 750 volt rail on its own power supply without a flashlight, sorry. Preferably two, and some spare cells. Spelunkers/cavers insist on carrying three sources of light, since their life can easily depend on it, I don’t think two is unreasonable for facing the urban version.
The one I carry has some very particular qualities that I like and demand, and a few that I don’t care for, but it has served me well for over six years now. We’ve gone though a whole lot of hard-to-find-at-decent-prices CR2 cells and a few o-ring replacements.
But, of course, it’s starting to show its age, as all tech does, and for a couple of years I’ve been keeping an eye out for something that might replace it. So far, no candidates.
Part of the problem is that about two-thirds of the flashlights I think might be possibilities turn out not to have a feature I insist on for my EDC light- the SOS mode.
Yes, the much-hated, much-reviled SOS mode. Some absolutely will not buy a flashlight that has it, I won’t buy one (as primary EDC) that does not.
It became fashionable to shun the SOS mode maybe seven years ago on some forums. I didn’t understand it then and don’t now. In any case, I’m not going to die for Internet forum fashion, sorry.
It adds no weight and no extra power draw to a flashlight, I have yet to experience an interface where it really “gets in the way”, and it could save your life. It’s not even difficult to imagine the scenarios where it could become critical.
Some self-appointed flashlight pundits scoff that it’s not needed because they know how to flash an SOS manually. Sure, so do I.
Try it. Don’t just run it as a thought experiment, try it. Sit down and for ten or fifteen minutes, by the clock, flash the SOS pattern over and over again as though you were trying to get someone’s attention. Two things are pretty certain to result, 1. You’re never going to want to do that again (fifteen minutes sounds like a short time, but doing something this boring and repetitive, it feels like it’s becoming a painful lifestyle), and 2. You will not be able to do anything else while you’re doing this task. Devoting potentially hours to one facet of your strategy in a survival situation to the exclusion of everything else you could be doing to improve your situation is not an option.
Some of the same self-appointed pundits say that any strobe or beacon mode, just a flashing light, would work just as well for attracting attention.
Absolute nonsense, sorry. It might be true, IF people know that you’re in trouble, and IF they are already looking for you, and IF you are out in wilderness far removed from other lights.
In a lot of circumstances, though, in urban and suburban areas and on the water at night, lights are everywhere, many are intermittently obscured, and even if someone notices a particular flashing light it could be anything or nothing. You shine a strobe at someone far away, they might wave. It carries no inherent meaning.
The SOS, for those who do still recognize it, is unambiguous. It says that you’re in trouble and need help. It is not something that is typically abused or over-used (and you may well face some very angry people if you do). Out on a boat at night, for example, or worse, in the water, an SOS carries a clear message that the chaos of other lights on the horizon does not.
Still, the forums seem to have succeeded in making it unfashionable, and the flashlight manufacturers have followed suit by largely removing the feature.
I won’t. If that means that my current EDC light has to last me until long past the time when its output and features become laughable, then so be it. We had a good thing going there for a while with practically all new LED lights having the SOS beacon built-in, and I’m unwilling to give it up for no reason.
– Robert the Wombat