i agree with the above posters. lexan is crap, i woulden't trust it as far as i could throw it. if someone showed up wanting to ride or ski with one of those things i would either ditch them at the parking lot, or trade them my bombproof alu shovel for the day so i know am safe. just think...would you want your buddies trying to chip thru rock hard avi debris to find you with a piece of plastic?
as for beacons i reccomend the barryvox pulse or the pieps dsp. these are 3 antenna beacons that can triangulate, mark found beacons, and split up the signals in a multiple burial situation. do yourself a favor and drop the extra cash for the new tech. the tracker is crap...i know, i have owned one for 4 years, and practiced regulaurly with it for 2 years.. its ok in a single burial situation, but in a multiple burial situation these things suck...they switch between the two signals sporatically, making it hard to "lock" onto a singal. the special mode for multiple burials doesn't work very well either, requiring you to narrow your field of view down to about 30-40 degrees to differentiate between signals. my search times for single burials decreased by a good margin when i upgraded to the pulse. my search times for multiple burials decreased substantially (read: minutes) when i got the pulse. and in comparison to friends with 2 anntenna beacons (tracker, original barryvox), lets just say by the time i had found 3 beacons they were just trying to find #2. bottom line is that most people buy the tracker cause thats what everyone tells them to get.they tout how "easy it is to use" giving people a false sense of security that when the **** hits the fan, its ok that they didn't spend much time practicing because their easy to use beacon will help them find their buried buddy. so keep practicing..no matter what you get. cause easy to use doesn't matter at all. if you sepnt the necessary amount of time to actually learn how to use a beacon, none are any harder than the others...the new ones just work better, plain and simple