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.