As appealing as the idea of an affordable ($179) smart watch personal locator beacon (PLB) might be, a recently publicized Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has garnered a fair amount of press would seem to be either an outright scam or dangerously naive. While many crowdfunding campaigns’ funding goals and delivery promises need be taken with [...]

NOTE: DME has withdrawn the SATRO PLB from the market. Click here for the final judgement in this lawsuit.
I have been getting a number of inquires about Astronics DME Corporation’s SATRO PLB-110 “world’s smallest and lightest” PLB that we first wrote about back in December of last year (2011). Besides being small, one [...]

Updated December 3, 2014: BriarTek’s patent claims relating to 2-way Satellite Emergency Notification Devices (SENDs) have been invalidated in a federal court ruling that granted summary judgement to Delorme. While the ruling makes interesting reading, if you are so inclined (Click here for links to the ruling download or viewing), the bottom line from [...]

(Click images for higher resolution photos)

NOTE: DME has withdrawn this PLB from the market. Click here for the full story about why you cannot buy this PLB
A new entrant in the PLB wars is claiming to be the world’s smallest and lightest Personal Locator Beacon, eclipsing the current record holder in this regard, the [...]

Press Release below. I admit to having mixed feelings about this. Winslow (my top recommended life raft manufacturer) was going to be sold, that was never a question since it was bought by vulture capitalists, and a sale to someone has been in the works for some time now. The good news, [...]

Three years ago at the RTCM Annual Meeting I made a controversial presentation titled, “What Price Your Life? Distress Alerting as a Commercial Service” You can read about that and review the presentation at: http://www.equipped.org/blog/?p=82
This presentation resulted in an invitation to give the presentation at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. I was [...]

Spot LLC has issued a product recall on the SPOT Satellite Communicator which is bundled and sold exclusively with the DeLorme Earthmate PN-60w. This comes just over a year after Spot had to recall its then recently introduced second generation SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger, or what is now known as SPOT 2. And, as [...]

UPDATE: July 21, 2011: FCC approval granted, now available for purchase.
(3D CAD images provided by ACR – click for higher resolution images – the images are an accurate representation of the new PLB I examined.)
It’s been a long time coming, but I just got a firsthand look at ACR Electronics’ answer to the popular [...]

(Click on images for higher-resolution photos)
(Updated 03/03/2010) While I was away this weekend the replacement for my recalled SPOT 2 arrived, as promised. This morning I unpacked the padded envelope and found a few surprises. Besides the reworked SPOT with a “You’re good to GO!” sticker on it (more on that shortly), there was [...]

(Replacement SPOT 2 received. Check it out here.)
Today I received notice that the replacement for my recalled SPOT 2 has shipped and was happy to see that they are offering those whose SPOT 2s were recalled an additional two months of service beyond the one added month originally announced. I had thought the original [...]