Hi Yibai,

The AccuSat MT410G Pocket Pro GPS Equipped model seems to be popular.

No idea on cost of battery replacement (7 year battery life).

Trig Instruments sell these at a discounted price of $705 + GST (which are slightly cheaper than the discount provided via the FMC cards when using the listed Akld aviation retailer).

http://www.triginstruments.co.nz/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=50&products_id=874

Cheers, Steve

Hi Yibai,

I was over in oz last week and they have one for sale over there at $300-400oz with the locator option plus preset txts that you can send to up to x people – think it was like 12 different numbers you can program in and looked smaller than the NZ beakons. I am not sure on the cost of sending the txts.

I doubt you can get them in NZ yet, but they will be on the way. I have a magazine at home with the advert so let me know if you are interested to take a look. Note you have to buy a PLB/EPIRB locally I think unlike GPS so you can’t buy the oz one and bring it over here.

Note the club are buying PLBs so you can get them for club trips or maybe even private trips. Ask someone on committee for information on the policy. That might be a good way to go, seeing as you are thinking of sharing anyway (as club will have the contact person sorted out for you already too).

mh

Thanks Steven & Marie. Yes I think you need buy a local one as the country code is different although I’m not sure about AU & NZ, in the FastFind 211 website it mentioned that model is only for NZ & AU…
Marie, I think I’ll go for the GPS version as I don’t think SMS will help much.
So the club is going purchase some? I’ll be happy to pay for a hire fee if that’s ok? I’ll use it only in private trips though.

Thanks
Yibai

sorry the one I saw does both the PLB plus a number of pre-set SMSs (so call it a PLB-plus device). Think the SMSs are ‘triggered’ through an even shorter satellite communication, getting around the bandwidth cost issue. That makes technical sense to me.

Any idea how the preset texts work? A few months ago I was trying to understand the 406 MHz protocol, and there didn’t seem to be space to include any information except registration country, ID, geographic coordinates if available, and maybe a few other simple things. It crossed my mind that it could be useful if there were space in the signal to encode some information about the actual problem, but anecdotal checks implied it’s not possible. (The reference docs are at http://www.cospas-sarsat.org/Beacons/406bcns.htm if anyone’s keen.)

Does it try to send them over the local cellphone network, or is it independently making use of sat-phone stuff?

Sorry Mike no idea off the top of my head, I think it must be a dual device given the dual application. On another front, I think I saw that they have individual satellite based tracking in the USA for the truely paranoid (last year when I was over). Your family and friends can logon to a website and track your progress (google maps?) – so it sends out location signals at certain time periods (hourly?) and they are recorded. But I don’t think they can communicate back to you yet using it and let you know you are going the wrong way! The nice feature would be they’d know when to come and get you from the road end though and even which road end too.

Of course Sat. phones have been around for many years now, so it all looks to be slowly converging to that with a few more spangles. No doubt all DoD technology beign slowly opened up to commercial use…. DoD aren’t very happy about ti, btu you can only slow it up so much.