My recent trip to Alaska exposed me once again to the array of communication devices beyond cell phones. As always, there are pros and cons for everything (text vs. verbal) but I want to get the opinion of others.
Primarily I saw: In Reach Explorers and SE models in use plus Iridium Sat. phones. So what are your thoughts?

I like my first generation InReach. Uses the Irridium satellite network. Allows me to send and recieve messages. Helps with my wife's piece of mind. Doubt I'll never not have one.

I use the garmin Inreach and it works awesome. The maps are pretty easy to read when paired with my iPhone. Easy to text to anyone in my contact list on my phone as well. I agree with Pointer, I'll probably never not have one. It replaced my garmin Rhino. Additionally I use OnX maps on my phone to delineate private/public property boundaries and I'm all set.

I would consider the in reach mini too if you don't already have a device.

Ok thanks for those comments

Do you have to pair with a cell phone with the inreach? Or are they a stand alone text machine?

Definitely works stand alone. The key pad is just terrible slow. Think texting in a flip phone. But it pairs easily through Bluetooth to a smartphone if you have one. Then through the inreach app it works just like you are texting on your phone.

Why would you want her to be able to give you a piece of her mind while you're out having fun?

inReach good.

Man I used to be hell on wheels with a razor flip phone...I'm sold now.

A lot of the trollers up here use Inreach to swap info on where the fish are. Keeps the info from being broadcast over the radio.

Garmin has two models, the Explorer and the SE. The Explorer also has GPS capability whereas the SE does not. Any thoughts on that difference?

SE has gps grid navigation and allows you to mark waypoints. I’ve never found it lacking or wished I had more capability in the field. But maybe I’m missing something.

I got an inReach mini this year. Tried to rent a sat phone, but there were none available, and so went that route at the last minute. Random thoughts:

It works really well. Takes a few messages to get used to.

Battery lasts supposedly 50 hours of standby, which seems accurate. Easily made it 2 weeks of use, but I don't leave it on all the time.

Garmin's app developers need to step their game up a bit. There are a few things that are just annoying.

You can't message another inreach with just the number. You need to have their garmin account (email). That would be a nice thing for them to advertise a little more so you don't find out when you are in the middle of nowhere....

They are not cheap. $350 for the unit, $25 for the privilege of not having an annual account, and then 30-something for the service per month (there are cheaper options).

Combining with a GPS would make some sense.... my phone GPS kind of blows. But I already had a gps that I like, so wasn't really interested.

After Garmin bought out DeLorme, they jumped the price of an Inreach SE by $100. I was able to find one of the remaining DeLormes.

LOL! Guess I'm just used to being told what to do and when...

Yes, InReach is good. If/when they upgrade the background mapping feature of the InReach I may spring for a new one. Until then, I just pack it and the PN-60/

I hunt & pack solo a lot so I have an inReach. I use the preset messages "I'm going to be late", "back at camp for the night", "I'm just headed down off the mountain". I flip on the tracking so my wife, brother and a couple buddies can see where I'm at.

How do the inreach's maps compare to a dedicated GPS? Seems like aheider and cwh2 had different takes.

Have you tried Gaia gps app on your phone?

I’m a fan of the Inreach but I don’t rely on their maps. Gaia is superior. Always trying to reduce weight so anymore all I take is my iPhone, inreach, light battery, and backup map/compass. 13 oz for that combo with the mini.

Frankly, from the perspective of someone who is comfortable in the woods, someone who has been lost plenty but never uncomfortably so, the price of these devices / services far outruns their value. The only thing they do in my world is "enable"/placate the hand-wringing worry-warts in my life who are exactly the misery I'm trying to get away from by going to the woods. Putting an electronic leash on myself devaluing my time alone for their comfort? Screw that garbage. Repeat: screw that garbage.

I don't know if that's the sort of "thoughts" bigwhoop was after or if he wants product comparison, but worded as the question was .. yep, those are my thoughts.

Tom

While I appreciate the point T O M is making, I value those in my life and would like an opportunity to communicate my situation. I am willing to have an "electronic leash" to keep them updated. I don't consider it a hindrance to my experience.

Last weekend I took a troop of scouts on a llama pack trip to some lakes 6 miles back. My InReach went along and we had a short training session on how to use it if necessary. It's a great assurance having a way to get help in a hurry if something happens to one of the boys.

Had an Garmin InReach SE (cheaper yellow one) for 15 mo. Really like it to keep in touch with my wife, brothers etc. Also great for coordinating bush plane pick up flights, getting weather forecasts from my wife, extending a hunt on the fly with the outfitter 4,000 km away, etc. I see most guides, outfitters, air taxis using InReaches preferentially to Sat phones. No garbled messages, instantly get the coordinates of the other party, etc.

Battery life on my unit is great. Just used 16% of the battery on a 10 day excursion (hunt) in the NWT. I turned it on several times a day to check for messages and send a few out. It is really easy on batteries....but my iPhone 7 paired with it using the Garmin Earthmate app and Bluetooth really burns batteries. I also use the phone as my camera and GPS with the GAIA app and otherwise turn it off. I had to charge it twice on the hunt and my $20 6700mah battery charge pack from Walmart keeps on doing the job.

I have a flexible plan that I can change 12 times per year. If I am hunting off the grid I get the unlimited text plan and otherwise run with a plan to pay by the text...basically having it as an emergency device.

If I was buying today I'd get the Garmin Mini InReach. It does everything I want and weighs half of what the SE weighs, with half the battery life, which would be enough for me.

Good luck with it.

Are any of these capable of contacting Emergency personal at the push of a button if a man goes down and possibly needs life flight?

InReach will. You push a single button and it automatically sends your GPS location to their office. They'll send you back a text asking what the problem is so they can send the proper response. They'll notify 911 in your area with that info. If you can't respond to the text, they'll send out the army. In either case, it pays to have a medical insurance policy that pays for transportation. A helicopter ride can cost $40k or more. One of my partners found that out 4 or 5 years ago when his horse fell on him.

Because of battery life, most people I know of don't carry it turned on. It only takes 10 to 15 sec to turn it on to send for help. If you can't do that, you likely can't send the message anyway. Turning it on and sending the SOS takes 3 button pushes total.

Thanks RC. Wife's all over me to get one. A young man recently lost his father on a hunt in Washingtons Cascades. The dad an experienced mountaineer had a device like your talking about on him. The son was able to contact emergency personal. He had to spend the night with his deceased father. Life flight got him the next day. A shout out to the horsemen that helped get the father to a safe place for the night. He was 54. Not an easy night for the son and loved ones. Thanks to the device a plan was made, executed and extraction completed in a timely manner. My family is covered with Life flight insurance for like $59 a year. I'll be looking into the Inreach asap. Thanks

There are still a few older DeLorme InReaches out there since Garmin bought them out. If you can find one, they'll somewhat cheaper and do the same thing. I see Amazon also has some refurbs for sale for a couple hundred off. They should work fine, too.

A few years ago, several elk hunters in WA went into some hellacious spot in the Cascades and shot a big bull. As they were dressing it out, one of them died of a heart attack. The article didn't say how they contacted help but it took a search and rescue team 3 days to pack him out of there. I don't know how long it would have taken them to pack out an elk but it wouldn't have been easy. It's hard to be ready for all incidents but if they didn't have some kind of satellite device, I'll bet they did by the next year.

I didn't download any of the maps for Garmin's Earthmate app, which is what you use to send messages for the inReach Mini. (There is no keypad on the mini at all). So, I can't comment on the quality of maps.

I can comment on Garmin's annoying message: "Your mobile device does not have maps for this area. Download free high detailed maps for use when there is no data connection..." that comes up every time I open Earthmate. Regardless of if I am in airplane mode, because there is no cell phone reception for 100 miles (which is the very reason I'm using the inReach and thus the Earthmate app). You would think that a company like Garmin would be able to put that together, but alas.... they are tards. I'd also love to find the person who thought a green "Sending" indicator on a green background was a good idea.

Back to the maps... my complaint was about the quality of the GPS on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S6 Active), not the quality of the maps. Since I break a phone every 6 months, I bought the S6A to see if I could improve my odds. It doesn't appear to have worked, as I cracked the screen in 2 places in under 2 months. But even before the screen broke, the GPS sucked. Points set the previous day were off by 2.5 miles when I tried to navigate to them. That was using OnX Hunt, which I have used on other phones with excellent results. Also, on about 60% of the inReach messages I sent, Earthmate would tell me "GPS signal is weak, do you want to send the message anyway, or wait for improved signal?".

I got the inReach because I was planning to set up Moose camp in a spot that my friends had never been to. They were planning to show up a few days later, and I wanted to be able to coordinate with them in the event that someone else camped in my preferred location, or I was not able to get to that location. Also, my wife and 3 year old kid were going to join me for a week or so, and the inReach allowed me to meet up with them without either party waiting around forever.

If you have to go to the woods to get away from the misery of friends and family..... get better friends and family. I don't think Garmin can help you.

InReach is the greatest wilderness communications development in my old lifetime. I've had a DeLorme InReach for five or six years and use it. I've never punched the emergency button but it is nice to have. I kept in touch with wife and family on a trip to the Yukon the past two weeks, such as when we had serious vehicle trouble waaaay out there, and football updates during grandson's HS game.

One of the best uses is when plans change when you are way out of cell coverage and you simply need to let somebody know. I.e. on a backpack hunt I went in a day early, and when I decided to move our camp two miles from where we had planned to meet, I simply texted my son and grandson to say so and where to find me. I also asked them to bring an item I had forgotten. Another time on a day hunt I found a good spot and decided to stay overnight and hunt the next morning instead of coming home as planned. I texted my wife to say so. Otherwise if I had not come home she would have phoned Search and Rescue. That gives me flexibility and is courtesy to her and SAR, not a tether but YMMV.

Thanks for that info!

Sat phones take continuous satellite coverage to work, but the Inreaches always leave me wondering if my message actually got through. If you can have an actual conversation on a Sat phone, you KNOW your message got through.

I have heard several stories of it taking several hours for an Inreach text to get to the recipient, if they get out at all. I never trust the "delivered", "recieved" or "read" indicators the Inreaches give when a message is supposedly sent. It doesn't mean the message was actually read. SPOTs are even worse.

Inreaches are much smaller than Sat phones. Ups and downs to them all.

I forgot to mention: We had one message that was not delivered at all. A later message sent to the same # showed up fine, so no idea what happened to the first one. My inReach said the message was delivered.
Of course, all of that can be mitigated to an extent with radio etiquette. If it is important enough for me to send, it is generally important enough for the other party to acknowledge. At a max of $.50/message, sending back a "roger" isn't going to break the bank.

I've witnessed these kinds of failures firsthand. How many times would you have to experience such issues to lose confidence in them? I've no confidence with inReach, but if it works for you, so be it. Having gone that route, I use a SPOT for check-ins and such and have a satellite phone when I need to communicate.

My Spot 2 unit worked perfect from 2010 up until it didn't in November of 2016, after I sent a msg from the lonely Montana trailhead whose delivery I was able to confirm with my cell phone. For six days I dutifully sent messages morning, noon and night. None were received. On the sixth day my wife (a very non-hysterical woman) phoned an acquaintance of mine who's local, and he thought it odd that I wasn't messaging from an area thick and rich with grizzlies...that spurred the decision by my wife to commission a helicopter search, as my local contact is friends with a local S/R helo driver. Up they went.

Ten minutes after that decision, I finished my half-hour BS session with another guy at the trailhead, and drove to where I had cell reception, where I had time to call my wife, listen to the story, and watch the helicopter fly over and then up my drainage. I got off easy for $1000 charter rate. My friend got to go on a free helo ride.


Irony: the Montana S/R outfit uses various generations of SPOTs to log flight distance and hours of several helos, with 100% reliability for the last many years...



I forgot to mention: We had one message that was not delivered at all. A later message sent to the same # showed up fine, so no idea what happened to the first one. My inReach said the message was delivered.
Of course, all of that can be mitigated to an extent with radio etiquette. If it is important enough for me to send, it is generally important enough for the other party to acknowledge. At a max of $.50/message, sending back a "roger" isn't going to break the bank.[/quote]

Point being, 2-way is critical. With the inreach, each message prompts a response. I have a couple of very interested and attentive folks at home who are charged with responding to each update. So far, no foibles.

I don't GAS for the most part about gps and mapping, but it can be handy to check out the topography just over the hill. This fall my plan A high hunt got hosed by a mechanical problem, so went to Plan B, where I had no maps but had been before. The limited mapping was helpful in that case.

I've got the Garmin Inreach SE. I also have a sat. phone which I've used but no longer use. Out of all similar devices the SE gets my vote.

Personally, I'm not using these devices in the backcountry to chat, but it is incredibly useful to be able to send AND receive messages. A huge advantage for me over a sat phone is I keep the subscription going. It was really expensive to do that with a sat phone. Now when I do a spontaneous trip in the boonies, I can grab my SE, "just in case."

I've used my SE to call for a bush plane pickup, to get clarification on remote caches, to get weather reports, to get coordinates and to check my location on a route, etc. Great battery life. Light. Links to my smart phone. A wonderful tool.

VEK made a very good point about these tools. They create expectations. They are great worry relievers when they work or when we remember to turn them on or report in, and they are among the worst of panic inducers when there is a glitch.

Personally, I tell my people back home that "No news is good news. If I'm in trouble, I can call for help on my own."

There is no perfect solution. The perfect is the enemy of the good. The SE is my favorite compromise.

If you send an SOS with an InReach, they'll text you back to find out what the problem is so you know they got it. If you don't get the text, it doesn't necessarily mean they didn't get it but could be that their text didn't get back to you. If you don't respond to the text, they'll assume you either are too hurt to respond or you've Darwinized yourself.

The Garmin inreach has been good to me. Had a few messages get to me late though, using unit to unit while commercial fishing this summer. Not sure if my partner didnt have the inreach by the window or what, but I'd get some messages in the evening that were sent in the morning. I do text 100's of times in a four day fishing trip though..

I don't have 100% confidence in anything, because I've experienced failures with everything. I've had a sat phone not be able to make any calls for several days at a time. I've had a sat phone drop every call after 15-20 seconds. Both experiences were on the iridium network. In fact, I'd say my connect rate with the sat phone is only about 80% (considerably lower than with the inReach), but that is partially because I don't do the check-in thing.

I'm not sure what your point is. That all electronic things can fail? Okay, we agree. My failure rate with the inReach is such that I don't trust it to work sufficiently to accomplish its task. Have I had trouble with satellite phones? Of course I have, but the plus of a satellite phone is that you immediately know when it fails to connect. I know that lots of people love their inReach, I'm just not one of them. As I said before, if it works for you, so be it. I have no use for an inReach as I've suffered too much from spotty service with it.

Just trying to answer what I guess was a rhetorical question.

I'm glad we agree though!

I do an InReach message check every time I turn it on during the day or in the morning...and leave it off the rest of the time. Don't see dropped messages with that system. Also ensure I have a clear view of the sky when sending or looking to receive messages.

I do much the same. I have not had a missed message either. The clear view of the sky can be important - usually it works fine in the tent, but if it seems to be dragging I will put it outside the tent.

Surprised by the experience of 406. Most of the first hand failures I know of have been with the spot, not the Inreach.

Have a Inreach pre Garmin did a lot of checking, before I bought very happy with it. Like the ability to pay for it when I use it, and suspend use when not. A lot easier to coordinate meetings on hunting trips in non cell coverage areas, and gives me comfort when alone far from home, or weathered in. Also carry it in my go to
shore boat bag , or flying up here. Spot has a very spotty reputation here for not working!