Garmin 010-01735-00 in Reach SE+ Satellite Tracker

I bought this for solo munros etc and have had it on a few trips now. I'm giving it five stars for the way it does what it is designed to do. It's a tracking, communicating and emergency device, it is NOT designed for use on its own for navigation of UK hills. You need a contract to use its satellite network, much like a mobile phone. Tracking, comms, emergency. It will track and publish your position on your individual webpage for others to see. You can send/receive text/email. An emergency button will put you immediately into a satellite SMS conversation with a global emergency room (who can contact local services etc). It works on the Irridium network so these features will always work anywhere around the world. Navigation. The main drawback is that you can't download UK maps (OS etc). The downloadable and free mapping isn't horrendous tho, it's just not detailed enough for serious use. The pretty tiny screen doesn't help either. Minor drawback is that you can't get UK grids. You can upload .gpx and other format routes and it is easy to track against these. Most importantly the device will give you a lat/long grid, a barometric altimeter reading, and all the usual trip and other basic data which you can feed into your overall navigation calculations. There's an app for your phone which bluetooths to the device. This gives a bigger screen to work with and makes writing messages much easier. Another plus is that it charges using a standard phone charger, so you can top up from the powerpack you already have with you for your phone. There is a reasonable manual online and I suggest reading that fully, and looking at the garmin inreach websites (the main one, and the realtime tracking one you can make available to friends and family etc) and there are a few youtube videos out now at time of writing. The emergency and comms features are what i bought this for and, for me, these alone more than justify the spend - the peace of mind for me and family is worth every penny. As a bonus, the grid/altitude/track data is an excellent support to map and compass etc for navigation.

Having just spent 48 hours walking and camping in a remote part of Scotland, I was so pleased to have this with me. Previously I had a Spot Gen3, the advantage of having the means to send and receive free text messages is a huge benefit over the Spot. Requesting a weather report is another key feature and providing friends and family with a means to track your progress and whereabouts is great. It's incredibly easy to use and with the peace of mind that help is at hand if needed, I wouldn't hesitate recommending it to anyone heading out into remote places. Only negs: location info doesn't support British National Grid. I don't think this is a substitute for a proper GPS navigation device. I use the Garmin GPSMap 64s, and the inReach is by no means a replacement.

Got one of these and the basic yearly subscription with unlimited preset messages (I don't care about tracking). Its been used on a few trips now and seems to do exactly what you'd hope it would, and my wife seems much happier getting updates from my solo stravaiging around phone-receptionless Scotland than in the past when I'd be out of communication for days. You get to set three preset messages (besides the SOS); I have "All well", "On top" (I have that one set to do a facebook post too) and "Camped". Anything not covered by those I could always send a spelled-out text message. Messages generally do seem to send within a few minutes of initiating them; maybe 10-15 maximum but usually much quicker. The main thing stopping me giving this 5 stars is: no support for OS grid references at all! All it does is GPS-ey lat-long coords, which is probably fine if you pair it with some mapping/navigation app on your phone (or if you do ever hit the "SOS" button) and obviously the website links it texts to people come up fine on the mapping site it links to... it's not so good for UK paper map users like myself wanting to use their inReach for a second opinion navigation device though. So incredibly I still find myself lugging my old eTrex out with me as well as this thing just in case I want to double-check my position in the clag or a white-out. The only other gripe might be that the keys feel a little flimsy; I'm not worried about that for just the minimal clicking needed to select and send a preset message, but if I was going to be a hardcore user spelling out long text messages I think I'd be worried I was going to wear it out (but picking out individual letters using the arrow keys would be so painful that probably using a proper on-screen keyboard on a paired tablet or phone would be the way to go for anyone wanting to do much of that).

The unit itself is ok the problem comes from the move from Delorme to Garmin. What was a fantastic subscription service is now a mess of confusion between the USA and UK billing departments. Having had un interupted coverage and subscription for the last 3 years the USA billing team canceled my subscription whilst I was In Pakistan despite my 'moved to uk billing' subscription being up to date and current for that month. I have been hesitant to believe some of the stories about the Garmin subscription team until it happened to me. If you need a product to stay safe in remote locations or dangerous countries find another solution as Garmin customer care is not the same as Delorme.

Muy bueno

I have owned the Garmin inReach SE+ for 3 months and used it for three trips and though I am very satisfied with my purchase, I do think you should know about some short comings. Before purchasing I researched pretty extensively the options, including other similar devices, the explorer and the mini. SE+ vs explorer... I didn’t pay the extra $150 for the explorer and I’m glad I didn’t. First a separate device for navigation and backup feels safer to me. Also I use the navigation quite a bit and I like not using the battery of my emergency device for that. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to in addition have navigation on my messaging/emergency device as a backup. But for me I don’t see a lot of value. As a lover of Caltopo, I much prefer setting things up there and then using Avenza and a paper map for navigation. Also note that you can get the Earthmate app for free with your SE+ purchase that runs on your cell. Though the maps weren’t as good as Backcountry Nav (which I use), it is also a nice app and worth getting. Also note that in a true pinch the SE+ can be used for Navigation. It shows you a blank map with routes and waypoints on it (whatever you have synched or created on the device). And the compass is pretty good in a pinch too. It isn’t actually a compass as you might expect, you have to start walking and then it uses the GPS to say what direction you are going. But if you are used to the unreliable cell phone compasses this is 1000x better. SE+ vs mini… Messaging on the SE+ is slow but effective. From what I have seen online (I haven’t used it hands on) the mini is too hard to write custom messages. I purchased this originally because I was going camping with my 12 year old daughter away from cell service. She has no problem creating a custom message and sending it with the SE+. We didn’t need to activate the SOS but I didn’t like the idea of her trying to use the mini to provide info the to SOS service using the limited mini in the case that I were incapacitated. Subscription I purchased the least expensive Freedom Safety plan and activated it for 2 of the 3 months I’ve had it. I probably won’t activate it again until next Spring. For the year this will cost me a little less than $50 ($15 annual fee + $12 per month for two months + $10 in misc charges—more on that below). My experience using it on trips Trip 1: For my first trip, before I left I setup 3 custom messages that went to my wife. For me the best messages are “Everything is good. Here’s where I am” “This is where we are camping for the night” and “Delayed in returning but fine”. I like it that these messages are always free, the receiver gets them along with a link to my location. I also have these setup so that they are on my map. Trip 2: For my second trip I went with my whole family and the problem was I didn’t redo my custom messages before I left. It was still nice to have the SE+ with me since I was again out of cell phone range and I could have used it in an emergency. But still it shows that without proper planning ahead, the safety feature of the phone is not nearly as valuable. Trip 3: For the third trip I sent it with my 15 year old son who was going back packing with his church youth group for a 4 day excursion. I set the phone to log his location every 30 min and set “extended tracking” on. That feature puts the phone to sleep between logging the tracking points. It was really fun to be able to watch where they were on the map. He also set a way point and I saw that show up on the map. Because I was have the cheapest plan, each tracking point logged costs me ten cents. But with tracking only every 30 min and then only when he was on the move—it was still cheaper than paying an extra $10 for the next plan up with free tracking. Also, I was very happy with battery life. I sent him with a full phone and three and a half days later the battery reported almost almost 90%. A few oddities I did notice. Each night it would show him moving just a little bit around one in the morning and five am. Not sure why. Also we reviewed the track together when he got back and he was sure that at one point when it showed him crossing the river and going up a hill a ways (two separate 30 minute points) he simply hadn’t gone there. Also, there were sometimes when it simply skipped reporting his location for a few hours. This happened three times. One of the three was excusable—I didn’t get any indication that they were driving home (about three hours) until they showed up on our doorstep and I chalked that up to the device being in the car. But the other two times he was hiking with the device attached to the backpack strap and the antenna pointing up and it just skipped logging. So it was great and I loved it that he had it with him, but it wasn’t perfect. Misc charges The ability to turn on logging and just have the device wake up and say where you are without having to manually send a message is great—but it requires you either to pay ten cents a message or get the more expensive plan. Though I have used the logging on every trip I took, I think in the future I’ll skip it and just manually send the messages a couple of times a day. The exception is if I am sending it with a child on a trip where I am not going with them. In that case, I do think it is worth it for me just to set it and let it do its own thing.

ce produit a un défaut, il se coupe lorsque je veux l'utiliser, je suis obligé de le mettre en charge, et je ne peux interrompre la charge qu'une fois connecté au satellite....

It holds a charge for weeks, especially if you turn it off at night after a final check-in. It does take a bit longer to make it's initial connection than I expected, and same thing for sending/receiving messages. Not unreasonably long, but definitely not as fast as cellphone sms. The sharable tracking map and ability to send the same message to several people are nice perks. I can't really say much about the messenger app that connects the Garmin to a cellphone because when adventuring, I generally keep my phone off to save battery power.

This is a good product and Amazon were selling it for a competitive price. I use this on a casual plan for when I travel remotely. It is great peace of mind and works well. The battery life is good. I don't find the Garmin Australia website easy to navigate and Garmin Australia have not responded to account issues I emailed them about. This is all disappointing. Having said that, the unit itself, when activated is good and as I said it brings peace of mind. I have not had to activate this in an emergency.