I do have to say - and I believe that Doug had a hand in it - that the new PLBs are much easier to use - that things would be less confusing in a time of severe stress.

I found my Terrafix 406 to be somewhat confusing - I could see that under stress I might have doubts about whether I was using it correctly. As I remember I have to press two buttons - I think its a Test button and a GPS button at the same time for a few seconds. What's with that? It would feel like that was just launching a test sequence.

As I recall it would flash a red LED, then green ... or something like that. I always thought that the red LED would make me think I was doing something wrong - like an error warning, and that would lead me to wonder if it was even working. The newer models are much more straight forward.