Originally Posted by
JohnJ80
We used an inReach communicator when my daughter was in the boonies in Bolivia. There was a health issue involved with one in the group and the communicator is just about one step better than morse code nor did if feel like it was all that reliable to me. For that sort of application where she needed to have her position tracked and for communication in an emergency, it worked ok and did what we needed it to do.
A friend of mine spent her 50th birthday hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. The whole summer really. This was before Garmin bought them, she had a DeLorme, and used the same tracking feature. It worked great.
Last weekend I got a puncture I wasn't able to repair, and did the road walk of shame back to my car. In an area with more bears than people. We had agreed on a time for Beth to hear from me before she worried, but I was late. It took me half an hour to walk back to the car, an hour to drive to the pavement, and then another hour to drive back to the freeway where I got reception and could pull over and send a message. Being able to send a "I had a mechanical problem, I'm going to be late but everything is ok" message would have saved a lot of grief.