I've been considering adding a few sat phones to my extended family for use in case of an emergency. Some of my family is in Alaska and their communications tend to be pretty marginal as it is. I work downtown Seattle and figure it could take several days to get home in an emergency.

I've got a couple of questions. I should point out that I was thinking of the Globalstar phones, but I'm open to other options.

Globalstar indicates their phone automatically uses cell if available and then switches to sat. Can this be manually selected? For example, what is cell service is available, but swamped?

How well do sat phones work indoors?

Any comments you might have about these phones would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-john