Not sure how much else they could do with it. You need to wave your phone around at the sky to send a few bytes of data. It must just be a really low capacity network.
I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
> I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
Also, difficult-to-use is better than zero connectivity, which is the current situation.
There is an argument that pay for rescue causes people to hesitate to call and that can lead to worse outcomes and/or more dangerous rescue scenarios.
And for a dedicated device, the tracking feature is laughably bad with worse accuracy than my friend's watch.
Better than nothing in case of emergency but the reliability leaves a lot to be desired.
There are lots of great places to land, but being stuck in the desert without any way to communicate is a very real possibility (Ironically, even at many small town airports I’ve landed at).
That said, aircraft have ELTs which are supposed to trigger on impact and can be manually activated as well, so an InReach probably wouldn't make a life-or-death difference very often.
Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.
[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.
It doesn't have to be perfect, compared to the current alternative of 1) Having nothing to fumble around or 2) Be one of the few people with a full on expensive satellite phone I think it's a valuable addition.
Similar to how Chase Jarvis said "the best camera is the one you always have with you", this is also the case for emergency equipment.
They tried getting helicopter evacuation but even that took hours he didn’t have.
Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)
> antennas with large effective apertures are considered high-gain antennas (or beam antennas), which have relatively small angular beam widths.
You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.
You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it
For emergencies, having to point at the sky isn't a big deal.
There’s been a lot of research into emergency UX. Basically, it needs to be dead simple or people die. In an emergency, people are usually panicked, injured or in shock. The tool needs to do its thing simply and effortlessly to cut through the panic and confusion of a real emergency. I have an avalanche transponder that is one big button because when you friend just got buried under 20 tons of snow and rocks, you have the leftover brain for one button.
From the demo, I think Apple is very aware of this which is why they give you a series of canned prompts. They’ve probably already used up a significant cognitive load by having you point the phone for signal that having you type as well was considered dangerous.
Your definition of the word “fine” is apparently rather generous. Be in an actual emergency situation and the InReach is down right frustrating as hell, but “better than nothing”. I don’t have optimism for Apple’s offering either for the record.
I've been using PLB for years and unless I'll only switch to Garmin InReach if I really need to communicate with people back home. Yes, it can be very handy, not just for that, but also to communicate with other fellow thruhikers in ways other than trail registers, but in some cases LEO might not be good enough for sending distress signal.
While it might have been possible for me to retrieve it (I spent a day searching it) if it were a tracker device (such as InReach), I found that even if you find a Garmin device, Garmin support won't disclose any details about its owner or contact them on your behalf. I'm not sure if for privacy or commercial reasons but I just found it awkward (I didn't find a device myself, but learned about it through Garmin support forums).
If I were to buy a new PLB today, I would have considered the newer models with Return Link Service (such as ResQLink 410 RLS). It doesn't let you communicate, but notifies you that your distress signal has been delivered to.
Just read the other comment. While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions, I really wish that Garmin would have made stats publicly available
Because I already owned the InReach (I also used it as a backup for business travel in "less than safe" areas) I never really looked at PLBs. I will look at the ACR range. The prices look pretty OK considering the InReach has a fairly high monthly cost and these don't.
Best to get a HAM license to be safe (it’s trivially easy to pass the General exam), but if you are only using it in an actual emergency, I highly doubt anyone will judge you too harshly for not having it.
It definitely is an outlier, maybe partially due to conditions (I wasn’t there, just was someone who received the other party’s messages way late), but that’s the point. An emergency situation is already an outlier as is, the last thing I want is to trust a device which has a definite probability of failure again. Screw “me” over once, shame on you. Twice? Shame on me.
Tell that to a someone I know who had a broken leg and not only was the location way off, it took multiple hours to send. He was around a half mile of a well trodden hiking path too, so help took no time to get there once the message was actually broadcast (while the location was way off, he was visible from that wrong location). He wishes he’d had a loud whistle instead.
> I'll take InReach any day.
I’ll take my Inmarsat based phone any day. Sure, the monthly fee is 1.5x higher, but I know my message AND my call will go through as long as I have a clear view of the sky.
I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Maybe I'll get a PLB too then, I'll think about it.
Yeah, the iSatPhone2 is fairly forgiving on line of sight as long as you aren’t in a canyon or hiking up the north face of a mountain. Given they are in geosynchronous orbit, targeting is much easier (just point antenna south). My iridium I had back in the late 00’s was a PITA to get signal on a hike where we had to call for an air ambulance for emergency evac.
So it was a bit tricky to reach the sat especially in hilly or built up areas.