Excellent point and another reason SPOT is not on my short list.

One of the irritating aspects of the news coverage on this has been all the free advertising for SPOT. Not one mention of the subscription cost, not one mention of alternatives. Most of the news reports that have mentioned SPOT have understated the purchase price, as well.

That's what happens when you have a robust advertising and promotion campaign and budget and a generally uninformed media and, for that matter, many in SAR and elsewhere. Fact is, SPOT would likely have saved them.

I don't mind if folks want to buy SPOT, for whatever reasons, but it really irks me that they generally are doing so without being fully informed. Bottom line is there's no practical solution to that. Plenty of history to show that "best" is not necessarily the winner in a technology battle... <~> The odds are not in COSPAS-SARSAT/406 MHz beacons' favor in this battle, long term, they don't have the resources or the attitude. <shrug>

Why would the 406 MHz beacons lose this battle? What resources are they lacking? Attitude?

Promotional budget and profit motive.

I think you can bet that SPOT's marketing people made a lot of phone calls over the past week, with this being one of the top news stories in Canada.

What Andrew said, to a great degree. The PLB market is relatively small, promotion of any sort is fragmented by the multiple players, none of which are very large, nor have they proven all that capable or fast on their feet. COSPAS-SARSAT secretariat isn't a player in promotion, it's just an international agency that oversees the various national partners. The U.S. or Canadian govt. hasn't the promotional means, flexibility or anything to compete against private industry in this regard. Many there don't even see it as a problem, for a variety of reasons.

Then add in the value added capabilities of SPOT vs a PLB. PLBs are limited in this regard as a result of the standards to which they are built. Nothing stops a PLB manufacturer from adding in capability, but it has to be in addition to the basic PLB capability and at that point cost and size/weight kill it. If there are changes in the standards, perhaps they will have a better chance in this regard, and that is under discussion. However, they represent fairly radical changes to accepted practices and that's hard to make happen. Will it come at all or come soon enough? Who knows?

Wouldn't that be an issue for ACR and McMurdo? They make and market PLB's and EPIRB's. Seems to me that SPOT needs to catch up and they're being a bit opportunistic with this incident -- ACR and McMurdo could have done the same but apparently chose not to do so.

Of the two systems though, isn't the communications satellite system used by SPOT less robust/reliable? It definitely has less geo coverage and that alone sold me on a real PLB.

Full size map at globalcomsatphone.com spot_map
Note that according to this map there is no (zip, zero, nada) coverage in Hawaii. That's the deal breaker for me. Also, no coverage in Africa south of the equator nor much of India (not a big deal for me, but for others it could be critical).

Les Stroud is a good pitchman though.

SPOT coverage in US looks good, except for Alaska. Unfortunate.

To Red etc...
Wolves attack on humans are extremely rare. Only a few recorded.

That's an easy one. Read them the riot act. If you or I picked up a distress signal and failed to pass on evey bit of infomation we had, we would quite rightly face criminal charges. So have the SAR make it very clear that if by their act or ommision someone dies or suffers injury, the operator(s) on duty, C.E.O. and board will face charges for murder, manslaughter, endangering life or whatever.

Being "less than cooperative" when lives are at risk is a criminal act by any reasonable measure.