The story
The RECCO rescue technology was developed by Magnus Granhed, in response to his personal experience with a fatal avalanche accident in Åre, Sweden, in 1973. Starting in the winter of 1978–1979, Granhed collaborated with Bengt Enander's team at the Department of Electromagnetic Theory, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm to develop an avalanche rescue system, using the principle of harmonic radar.
Granhed formed RECCO AB in 1983 and created the first functional prototype. In 1987, a woman was localised with the RECCO rescue technology from a helicopter in Lenzerheide, Switzerland, in the first live rescue found using the technology.
In 2015, RECCO introduced the RECCO SAR Helicopter detector that expands the technology to finding a missing person in other outdoor environments.
From Wikipedia’s article on RECCO, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4