Avalanche transceiver, probe and shovel — the three parts of companion rescue. None works alone, and the transceiver goes under your jacket, never in your pack.
An avalanche safety set is not insurance, it's a tool — and a tool only works if you can operate it blind. The reason is time: survival odds stay above 90% in the first minutes and drop sharply after about 15. Organised rescue almost never arrives inside that window, so it's your own group or nobody. The typical mistake is owning the gear and never drilling with it. The search runs in fixed phases — signal, coarse, fine and pinpoint search — and when you dig you start roughly 1.5 times the burial depth downhill instead of boring a vertical hole. What often gets missed: equipment never replaces a decision. More than 73% of studied avalanche accidents showed recognisable warning signs beforehand. No safety set stands in for an avalanche course.