BLESS YOU!

I advise you to watch out for silver-tongued devils like this one.

HB!

Congrats!

It appears to me that signing up at the 406 link could level the playing field some when choosing between a Spot2 or a PLB. According to what I read on the website you can pay for a yearly service plan that allows you to send "I'm okay" or another pre-set message to up to 5 contacts using the self-test button.

Website is here: http://www.406link.com/index.html

I also wonder if you could pre-arrange with your loved ones that if you send, say three "I'm okay" messages within a minute or two then that means "come help me" or something to that effect. If I'm right, that would mean it could function basically like the Spot2 except also have the increased reliability of a PLB.

I haven't looked at how the costs might compare.

LOL! You guys are making this birthday much easier to take.

Thanks Ann! Back to researching I go!

Congratulations with 30



Hmm.... Will a sequence of identical messages in short intervals be interpreted as one (repeated) attempt of sending the same message?

I very much like the idea - and it would be GREAT to have some "I'm fed up/in non-immediate distress and wanna go home" - message to friends and family. But before such a code can be used, someone should actually test how frequent you reliably can push the "I'm here" button on that particular system. Oh, and the "code" (number of times to press that button) should take into account some expected failure rate of that kind of message. What if your spouse receives 2 such "I'm OK" messages? Is that you pushing the wrong button? Or is it 3 messages where one is lost?

This is an interesting notion. To avoid ambiguity, I would follow the "no news is good news concept." The only message that would then be sent to family would be a low level emergency sort of thing - Please meet me at the trailhead, etc.

My wife is of the, "no news, no calls w/in plan window, means he is dying in the desert". (very slight exaggeration).

Before going with SPOT I was heavily swayed by ACR. In fact I still carry a very old, but reliable rubber button ACR Firefly strobe that ran on those lipstick style mercury or lithium cells before I converted it to CR123.

Anyway, I have never seen a dedicated PLB act as a I'm Okay function using the test sequence. Interesting but honestly I think its trying to make something into something it is not. I mean, we do that all the time but somehow to me it feels weird using a test function as a communication function.

SPOT2 messages are sent over several minutes. You could not hit the button multiple times for multiple updates going to the recipient.

What SPOT2 does very well (w/ some learning) is track the unit online. For hiking I usually set up a Shared Page for my wife to see online. When in Track mode the unit pings the website every ten minutes and to make sure there are no gaps, it sends the last one (maybe two) pings to make sure the gap is filled in. This way DW can see where I am at. For some of my routes she knows my exact turnaround (hilltop, river, etc) so she can see right away if I am heading in, heading out, and so on.

In the interests of accuracy and full disclosure,, I must state that whatever silver might have been resident in my tongue has long since migrated to my hair....