On a trip report thread, PDX Outbound asked for details about the inReach device I was using.
It’s an old
inReach 1.5 paired with an iPhone 4.
Power: It runs on AA batteries, and it kept a charge for the entire 2-week trip, tracking us every 10 minutes for 6-12 hours per day. I brought extra batteries but didn’t have to use them. (I brought a power pack for the phone, but didn’t use it enough to need to charge it.)
Functionality: As a standalone unit, it can send one of 3 preset messages to a predefined contact, or can send an SOS signal to emergency services. I have it set up to send “I’m ok” / “bit of trouble but we’re fine” / “we’re in trouble and have activated S&R” to my wife. I’ve used this feature to send “I’m ok” and it worked just fine.
Paired with a phone or tablet via Bluetooth, it can send and receive text messages and can be used for simple GPS navigation. The topo maps on the app are terrible — I can’t figure out why Garmin hasn’t integrated its much superior map tech with inReach since the acquisition. If you’re a GPS person, think you’d be hard pressed to use inReach for that purpose. The app has “waypoints” and some other features I’ve never bothered to use; they don’t seem very user-friendly, especially on a tiny screen. I’m a bit old-school and am happy with its simple ability to give me my location when I need it.
I enjoy being able to reconstruct my trips from the stored data after the fact. I can see routes, distances, speed, heading, messages sent and received, which help when putting together trip reports and which help for trip planning (how far can we expect to travel, how fast do we go, etc).
Unlike the new versions, this one doesn’t pull weather forecasts, as far as I know.
Reliability: So far, it’s done everything I’ve asked it to, with one exception: it
mysteriously stopped tracking us and logging our route on one segment of our trip. I think it would still have worked if we’d needed to send a message or an SOS, because during that period I checked our position on the phone and it showed us where we were, so it was obviously communicating with the satellite... it just didn’t send pings about our track for some reason.
When I bought the unit in 2016, it was already old tech, and I worried about it becoming unsupported and obsolete. The same concerns remain, although so far it’s been working like a tank.
Value: A new inReach device runs $350-600 depending on the model. Obviously used units are cheaper, and if you’re looking for a first-gen unit like mine, used is your only option. I bought mine on kijiji for $125. Monthly plans are reasonable —$20/mo for basic service where you pay for each track or message you send, up to $75/mo for unlimited usage. You can suspend the plan anytime you’re not using it and go into “hibernation” for $3/mo.
Support: I haven’t had any issues so far. Garmin has farmed out its Canadian customer service and support to a company called Roadpost but the technical end still sits with Garmin in the US, so I imagine it could be a bit of a runaround if you had problems to sort out. I don’t know how long they’ll support these old devices; I’ll probably keep mine as long as they continue to do so.
Old vs. New: John Abercrombie noted on
this thread that he had issues with a newer device. I would imagine that the tiny screen and scroll-and-click interface would make it tough to use without a phone pairing. Aside from weather reports and possible future issues with tech support, I don’t see any advantage to upgrading. On the other hand, a friend who mainly does hiking and horse trips has an Explorer Plus which she mostly uses for weather and SOS, and she’s happy with it — no reported issues.