Any emergency beacon is better than none, but two-way communication can be a literal lifesaver. I hope that the Starlink system is eventually linked into our 911 infrastructure and available to anyone with an LTE phone regardless of carrier.
Also to communicate on-the-fly decision-making to inform potential SAR - "I'm making good time, going to head up this extra peak before continuing the planned route."
I'm happy to have a cell phone backup to the inReach, but I don't see this Starlink offering as a replacement. That goes double if you're out in winter. Phone batteries aren't great in the cold.
You should have no problem with that anywhere in the world as long as you keep it in an inner pocket. Perhaps pack wired earphones just in case you need to make a long call while keeping the phone itself warm.
Notably the battery should not be charged below about 5C. If you do, it will be permanently damaged.
This depends on the specific battery chemistry. The BMS should prevent the charging scenarios which would damage the battery. For some it's 0C not 5C. Some can handle charging below 0C.
Even the cheapest chips from TI and ST seem to include it. And modern cell phones often advertise extra-fast 20W+ charging, so I doubt they're using the cheapest chips.
They've been the only ones that don't just turn off in really cold temperatures, even without babying them in warm pockets.
The general ruggedness is also pretty good to amazing, depending on how fragile your previous phones were. For example: it survived a ~10 meter (32ft) drop on rocks, whereas everyone was convinced it was done for.
To be honest I first thought it would be a gimmick, but being able to see heat / rough temperature degrees has proven itself quite useful.
But you don't really realize it until you have it available. It's kind of like having another sense available to you.
Random examples of where it was useful:
- finding shitty chargers/electronics which were really hot while doing nothing -> wasted power
- spotting a water leak before it was visible (think cold spot in the middle of the ceiling)
- checking car tire alignment (one side hotter than the other)
- finding buried hot water pipes
- finding where cold air is leaking in during winter
- spotting damp areas
and probably others that I'm forgetting right now
I had that in my hometown in eastern France at 800m altitude, a town a few km away has a record of -41. -15/-20c was almost a yearly occurance when I was a kid
Once I was stuck with a ridesharing car opened and off in -20C because my old samsung s8 throttled so bad I couldn't even reboot it. It was completely unresponive with the flashlight still on discharging it even faster.
I couldn't leave the car too, being responsible for damages during the rent.
After a bit of time I remembered that to force shut down newer androids you have to hold volume down and power. Why would they not keep it as a long press is beyond me.
If Starlink's solution is really completely unmodified LTE, I'd expect 911 calls to work regardless of being a T-Mobile subscriber, just like for existing terrestrial networks (where you can dial 911 even if your carrier does not have signal in a given location, or even entirely without a SIM card).
The satellites can correct for "global" latency themselves (unless there are higher-level parts of the LTE/E-UTRA radio protocol that can't tolerate such long latencies, e.g. ARQ timers).
For GSM as a half-duplex technology, there's also the matter of devices not being able to transmit and receive at the same time, but I believe the same principle applies: As long as the timing differences between different devices in the same spot beam isn't too large, that's something the satellites could globally correct for.
The same probably applies for doppler corrections.
And couldn’t the satellites mostly adjust for that, given that the relative doppler shift should be pretty constant between mobiles in the same spot beam?
https://eudl.eu/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-66628-0_41
doppler shift is not a constant for a stationary observer from Earth.
With PLB, satellites can't accurately measure where the PLB is; the search and rescue crew will find you by local radio reception.
With a satellite messenger, the gadget knows its own GPS location to a pinpoint and can send that as part of the SOS signal. And you can text the SAR staff and say "I fell and I'm now stuck on a tall ledge halfway up the cliff".
I guess this is the first time it's occurred to me that hikers and backpackers and such carry them too, which is odd because I hike and backpack.
I picked up the InReach after finding myself 200 miles offshore in a sailboat without an engine or battery power (which meant no VHF or electronic navigation equipment or autopilot or even red/green lights for others to see us at night) nor any way to make power
I assume the 406 Mhz beacon has a range of a few miles?
Other than the compass (which was only visible in the day time) the EPIRB was the only piece of equipment we assumed to work on the aforementioned voyage. We of course didn't test it as we were able to make it back safely, but I should probably learn more about how it functions.
We were sailing like demons. One of my biggest regrets of the trip was that we didn't have any wind or speed instrumentation to let us know how fast we were going, but it felt extremely fast.
They’re very safe, last something like 10 years, and aren’t really expensive (compared to “I need to know what direction I’m going and have no way to do so, or can’t see it”).
There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.
The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc.
This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass.
Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case)
I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind.
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.
I'm glad you lived to tell the tale, stranger.
Honestly glad my wife was aboard as it lowered my risk threshold enough to get me to want to abort.
Sounds a lot like ocean racing sailboats under normal circumstances.
I quit ocean racing (after about 5 seasons) when I had a sudden realisation that the only part that was any fun in the last 3 days was sitting in the bar after it was over and talking about it. And there were ten times as many non-crew people there enjoying that with us as there were crew on the boat I raced on.
Before getting an InReach, confirm a 406MHz emergency beacon doesn't fit your bill [1][2]. (I have this one [3].)
You can't text a loved one. But with no subscription, a years-long battery and powerful radio that works around the world, you can call emergency services to your precise location.
[1] https://www.sarsat.noaa.gov/emergency-406-beacons/
[2] https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/personal-locator-bea...
[3] https://www.rei.com/product/161982/acr-electronics-resqlink-...