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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

A few hundred dollars seems fastastically expensive to me. What is possibly inside it that justifies that price?

They need to be engineered to last for a long time between maintenance, be able to withstand the elements (saltwater, sunlight), and it's critical that the unit functions when you need it. The units are built very tough - mine is waterproof and also floats. The unit has test functions for the GPS and radio, and it has to work for 30+ hours continuously after it's been activated.

These things are also regulated by the government and need to meet certain standards.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with this attitude?

People will spend thousands of dollars on ultralight gear, and then balk at $300 for a magic button that summons a helicopter when you have a broken leg.

It's literally the cheapest life insurance you will ever be able to buy.

You should try making that argument quantitative.

A few hundred dollars to be able to get help in a potentially life threatening situation sounds fantastically cheap to me. That's the difference between cost plus pricing versus value pricing.

Unless you have some idea how often they are used successfully, you have no whether you're getting a good value.

It's a safety device; it must work reliably in adverse conditions, which is a requirement no consumer device, including €5000 TV sets, can meet. Also I believe in case of failure it would expose the manufacturer to some nasty lawsuits, hence the cost which very likely is equally spread on research, top notch build, quality control and insurance.

Why must it? Why not have they work only with 80% reliability if it could lower the price and put it in the hands of way more people?

Because if it had 80% reliability it wouldn't be a safety device at all. Think of cars, would you buy at a very discounted price a car whose brakes would fail 2 times out of 10? Different contexts, I know, but when safety is a must price doesn't matter much.

When I think of cars and safety, I think of Takata airbags.

I encourage you to be more quantitative. We trade money for safety constantly. Every time you drive your car to work you do so, and likewise every time you buy a small car.

As of a decade ago, incorrect airbag deployment killed one person for ever 7 lives it saved. Nonetheless, they were mandated by law for many classes of cars, and were purchased voluntarily for others. And this was the right decision. They could have spent thousands of dollars per unit to get the mistake rate even lower, but that wouldn't have been worth the money.

It’s a satellite commS device. You also need a service for it to be useful.

I do find it somewhat amusing to read a comment that a device that locates me anywhere on the planet and can communicate that information via satellite costs a few hundred dollars! to be vaguely amusing.

There are really two different options here. Some devices, variously called EPIRBs, PLBs, and ELTs depending on the exact device and application, report to a system called COSPAS-SARSAT which is a free service operated by an international collaboration. You do not need to pay any service fee for these, although you are required to register them with a local authority (the Coast Guard in the US) so that they have contact info for you.

These devices tend to be expensive because most of them are manufactured to either FAA or Coast Guard standards that are pretty strict and require things like a multi-year permanent battery, water intrusion and impact tests, etc.

On the other hand you can get a couple of different consumer-pointing satellite communicators that rely on commercial networks, mostly GlobalStar. Spot X and Garmin InReach are the two big ones. Both are cheaper up front but require a monthly service plan. They do tend to have fancy features that PLBs can't offer like two-way text messaging, but they're not generally built to any particular standard for durability, so you wouldn't want to use them, say, at sea or in an airplane.

The COSPAS-SARSAT system also generally has better coverage than GlobalStar but there are tradeoffs, esp. depending on the different capability levels.

The thought that they're pricey seems like a reasonable thing when you compare e.g. a $400 EPIRB to the $200 Spot X, but the EPIRB is tested to work in water whereas the Spot X has janky firmware that doesn't always work great anywhere (I love mine but... it has rough edges).

> ...mostly GlobalStar. Spot X and Garmin InReach are the two big ones

These are different though. SPOT works on globalstar which has gaps in coverage, particularly large parts of the Pacific. A coverage map is here: https://www.findmespot.com/en-us/products-services/coverage-...

The inReach works on iridum and claims 100% world-wide coverage.

Personally I carry an EPIRB for the boat, a PLB on the lifejacket and an inReach for texting. Cheap insurance.

A simple “expensive compared to what” seems in order. I agree it’s expensive, just not particularly so in USA or other high-income countries, which is a good point to make. However, in low-income countries where satellite communications are prohibitively expensive, even if you can alert emergency services, they may be unavailable or unreachable or outside the rapid response area you need emergency services in.

Basically, if you can afford it, it works. If you can’t afford it, satellite comms might not have saved you anyway, even if you had it.

You absolutely do not need service to use a PLB. You pay $300 once and fill out a (free) form online with your extended/emergency contact info.

A satellite text messenger like SPOT is not a PLB.

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