On Saturday, March 29, 2014 4:48:17 PM UTC-7, son_of_flubber wrote:
On Saturday, March 29, 2014 5:59:08 PM UTC-4, darrylr wrote:



Darryl



Darryl, thanks for clarifying that SPOT/IN_REACH are not equivalent to PLB in terms of reliability and in terms of who handles the emergency response (and how well and reliably they handle it).



The SPOT/IN_REACH marketing materials pander to the end-users' wishful thinking that these devices are equivalent in functionality.

InReach is different from SPOT in several important ways. SPOT is simplex only, so has no idea if a satellite is even in sight, all it can do is just fires off messages and hopes it gets through, it repeats doing that to try to get messages out. And it can't do bidirectional messaging as there is no duplex link to the device. And for soaring use the big thing is InReach has altitude. With the capabilities of InReach, SPOT should effectively be of no interest in the soaring community.

The early operation of the SPOT "911"/"SOS" type services seemed pretty scary and literally GEOS seemed to be calling the local 911 service in some (many?) cases. They seemed to get their act together a bit better over time. The government, industry and others seemed to pretty worried about all this, and there was supposed to be work to improve things though minimum product specs and rescue coordination/procedures through NSARC (National Search And Rescue Committee). I've just not sure where all that currently is at.