ACR ResQLink View PLB Review (ACR PLB or Garmin InReach?) - HikingGuy.com

hey guys this is the ACR rescue link view this is the newest plb from ACR it is an emergency distress beacon that you take with you in the backcountry I'm gonna go through a few things today I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about what it is exactly how it works how it compares to the inReach devices and then I'm gonna walk you through the device so how the antenna works the buttons all that fun stuff if you just want to get to the device and you already know all about PL DS and you can just skip ahead but otherwise let's get into it so this is the ACR Rescue link view it is a PL be a personal locator beacon you use this in the backcountry or in the middle of woods anywhere you don't have a cell phone signal to trigger rescue a distress signal and it's dead simple to use you just flip this antenna open hit this button and you will set a rescue or the process of a rescue into motion now this is made by ACR ACR has been in this business since the 50s they've built survival gear for the Apollo missions they've been building the sailboat version of these for years called an e perb they've been building him for aircraft in the mid 2000s the technology got small enough that they could make a personal level beacon which is what this is a PL B and this is the latest version of that now there's a couple new units this is the rescue link view there's also rescue link 400 there are same the same unit aside from this screen ok the word viewer hence the word view I think this is definitely worth the extra couple bucks one of the kind of Achilles heels of the old units were that you didn't know what was happening so you didn't know if it got a GPS GPS fix you didn't know if it was broadcasting you'd have to decode a series of LED lights on the unit to know that with the view you can actually get a message in English that says hey I have a GPS this is your latitude and longitude I'm broadcasting on 406 I'm low on battery whatever the message might be it's in plain English right there and you don't have to figure out the blinking LEDs and what that all means so before we start diving into the details of how to use the beacon it's going to help a lot to understand the mechanics of how they work now the ACR rescue link view is a plb that contacts the COS pass Sarsat system and this is a system of satellites that was first started in 1982 by a bunch of different governments including the United States Soviet Union at the time some European governments and believe there's 47 and all now to set up a global distress monitoring system for everything for aircraft for ships and for people and it works based on all of these satellites here so what you're looking at now is a map of all of these Sarsat satellites circling the earth so when you first hit your emergency beacon it will try to broadcast to any one of these satellites now there's satellites on a few different levels so let me show you how that works so let me explain the workflow using this handy diagram from cospas-sarsat so when you first hit your plb distress beacon it will broadcast a message on 406 megahertz that's the frequency and that will go into outer space and that will reach hopefully multiple satellites and three types of satellites the first is Leo SAR these are low orbit alights these are about 500 kilometres I believe above the earth and they can be stationary or moving then there are gos R so those are geostationary satellites about 30 or so kilometers above the earth that stay in one spot and always have coverage and they have good coverage because they're high up so they can kind of go polar Pole then the newest addition to this search-and-rescue system is mio SAR and that's the medium orbit satellites and these are ones that actually orbit the earth continuously and are part of the positioning system so GPS GLONASS Galileo now you might notice that these our systems for positioning right they also double duty as relays for distress signals so when you hit your plb you're hitting these satellites these aren't necessarily dedicated search-and-rescue satellites but these are other satellites positioning ones weather imagery doubling up as search-and-rescue beacons or transmitters so once you've once your signal has reached the satellite these ground stations and there's a bunch of ground stations around the earth are listening for these signals and they receive it and they'll also receive your position now on the AC our rescue link view there's a GPS on it so when you broadcast your distress signal it's also broadcasting your latitude and longitude and that's determined by the beacon itself but if for some reason the GPS is not working or you don't have a signal when these ground stations receive your signal they're able to receive the signal from potentially many satellites up here and you saw in that last video there were 72 search-and-rescue satellites and they can determine your position through with something called Doppler and on Traverse triangulation processing so they basically kind of triangulate where you are based on where the signals coming from so another layer of redundancy that's that's pretty neat for the pl bees that you don't necessarily get on the Iridium inReach devices and I'll talk about that in a second but anyway from these ground stations it will go to your National Mission Control Center and they will take your beacon ID they will match it to a registration that you fill out when you first get your beacon that will tell a little bit about yourself so you know you can put in whatever you want you can say generally solo hike you can update it you can say I'm hiking in the backcountry or the last guy I have 30 day supply whatever it might be they will figure out who you are and where you are and then they will determine which rescue organization to contact so let's say you're in the Grand Canyon they'll probably contact Kanyon you know Park officials if you're maybe in Southern California they may contact the LA Sheriff's Department and from there they will organize the search and rescue effort now that can take you know that can take a while rescues don't happen within a matter of minutes they happen in a matter of hours or more or days depending on the weather and the conditions so you're not going to necessarily press the button and see a helicopter and you know 20 minutes it will probably be longer than that so from there they will send out search and rescue teams and you don't always get a helicopter it's not a privilege to get a helicopter they will determine the best way to evacuate you from there but because you're using the beacon and they can't have a two-way conversation with you they will assume that you need to be evacuated as quickly as possible and they will proceed you know on that that vector based on that so you might get a helicopter if you hit your plb now one thing it's not on this diagram but I'll talk about is the beacons that you have when the rescuers get close so let's say there is a helicopter coming your AC our rescue link broadcasts a 121 megahertz signal and that will let it's basically a homing signal so as the rescuers get closer they will be able to home in on the beacon the beacon also has a strobe on the bottom that has visible and infrared light so if it's nighttime and they have IR goggles on they'll still be able to see your beacon on their IR goggles or you know however they need to but you have multiple ways of being found aside from just the GPS and the distress signal that initially gets sent so that's that's the mechanics of the rescue so you might be asking yourself how is the ACR different than in reach device because they're similar right to in reach uses satellites and if you're not familiar with the in reach it's built by Garmin there's a few different models I'm gonna say in reach I'm going to generically refer to all of the in reach devices that communicate with the Iridium satellite network which is what they use to do distress signals I have a mini right here and I have the review for the mini and the Explorer and some of the other enriched devices on my website so if you want to go into detail on these you can certainly do that just go check out the links at the bottom of the page here but otherwise let me go into some of the details about how these are the same and how they differ and when you would use one versus the other now as I explained the ACR uses the low medium and high satellite so there's three different levels of satellite that it can get in touch with the inReach uses the Iridium satellite network which is a series of privately owned low-earth orbit satellites and they have a hundred percent coverage on earth so your chances are good of getting a signal and broadcasting it with the inReach as well as the ACR now that signal network is approximately sixteen hundred and ten megahertz around there this is 406 this has a longer wavelength so theoretically these signals will travel farther than the in reach signals the in reach also has a speculated on broadcast broadcast wattage of 1.6 watts this is a 5 watt beacon so theoretically the ACR has a stronger signal now it's a bit apples and oranges because there are different frequencies different satellite networks I have never done a side-by-side rescue comparison and I will not do that hopefully but all I can say is that they're both reliable since the the 406 megahertz beacons came in to to play in 1982 there have been over 43,000 rescues with these types of p lbs the inReach technology is much newer but there have been 3,000 rescues within reach devices when I'm making this video at this point and there's just going to be more so they're both reliable I use in reach all the time to communicate you know in a non rescue fashion and I can tell you it's pretty reliable it works most of the time so either way they're solid pieces of technology the ACR has the longer track record of rescues it's on a network dedicated for rescues there's some satellite redundancy different types of satellite different countries controlling satellite Iridium is a little more sketchy because it's just sort of a single network but it does have excellent coverage and it is from a technology standpoint effective one of the important advantages of the inReach over the ACR is its ability to do two-way communications so with the ACR I can text people back and forth whether they're emergency personnel my family sheriff whoever it might be I can have it back and forth communication so it's interactive now the ACR is a one-way street this is the thing you use when you're in danger of life and or losing a limb losing your life losing a limb you deploy it you hit a button and the next time you talk to somebody will be when they're rescuing you so this has some advantages and the advantages are there's a few obviously you can if you're hurt you can talk to people on the other end and get a diagnosis get advice for what's going on for your situation whether that's a medical situation an evacuation situation a self evacuation situation it's also handy for less sort of deadly situations right let's say you're doing a thru-hike for a few days and you get sick and you come to a road and you just want your family to come and pick you up you're done you're throwing up whatever it is it's not gonna warrant an emergency distress or emergency signal but you are gonna want to get out of there so with this you can simply just text your family or friends or whoever and say come and pick me up I need help you can also get weather reports and uses for navigation so it's sort of a multi-function Swiss Army knife type device whereas this guy is just good for one thing and that is signaling a rescue and having tools on board that will help get you found another important distinction between these two devices is how the distress signal becomes an emergency the rescue situation and I explains the architecture and kind of workflow of how the ACR works but it's important to note that all of these satellites on the ACR network the 406 the cost paths are set network our government satellites so there's weather satellites there's GPS there's American government there's European government there's a multitude of satellites that do double duty to relay distress signals when it goes to the grounds the Mission Control Center is a government organization that handles contacting your local authority to get somebody out to rescue you that's all done by the government with the in reach you use a company called gos and gos is included in the subscription plan and I'll talk about that next but it's a private company now it's a very good company they have a excellent reputation they've performed thousands of searches and rescues worldwide they basically have contacts with everyone worldwide with all the different local agencies as does the government and they will coordinate the rescue now gos also has doctors on call and you know experts who can help you answer questions that might not necessarily require a you know a helicopter evacuation or emergency evacuation such as medical questions you know getting you out if there's forest fires whatever it might be you can do that all with Geo's with this guy you hit a button that goes to the government and somebody comes and rescues you now for both situations they're both going to contact a local authority like a Park Service a Sheriff's Department whoever might be to come and rescue you the only thing I would say is you might have well you definitely have an advantage with the inReach because you can do two-way communications so let's say you smell smoke and you think there's a wildfire and you want to get out you can evacuate yourself but you're not sure if that's a possibility you can re you know reach Geo's and give them your position and tell them your plan and get feedback on the fire and figure out a way to evacuate or maybe they'll send a helicopter because you're an imminent danger with this guy you can't do that but it does go to a government control center and at that Mission Control Center you know they interact with the Coast Guard they interact with the Air Force I'm guessing and this is pure speculation but I'm guessing that if you needed a very very urgent evacuation they would probably get an Air Force helicopter to come out to you before they went through all of the channels to get a park service and wasted that time if it was imminent danger again pure speculation but this is the government they're tied into that sort of workflow this is a private company you know they have to make a few more calls now let's talk pricing both of these items are similar in price and they vary obviously their sales and stuff but $250 and up you can get one of these this is believe is $350 now it depends sales all that fun stuff but ballpark to 50 and up you can get either one of these devices now the difference is that with the ACR you pay that fee upfront and you don't have any other fees and you can just throw this in your backpack you can forget about it there's no monthly billing there's nothing until you have to replace the battery in about five years which I'll talk about in a second so nice if you don't want to pay more than just the beacon price now with the inReach you need a subscription to use it it's like a cell phone plan and if you go to my any my inReach reviews I'll talk about what those subscription plans are how much that cost and you know what's involved but it won't work without the subscription plan you can't just buy this hit an SOS and expect somebody to come if you have aren't paying for the subscription now the subscription includes other services like you know preset text messages maybe tracking you can get weather reports it's not just distress that you're paying for but this is just distress now one of the other things that's included in here I mentioned geo surley er if you get a subscription the geo stress q service is included with that subscription and you can also add on rescue insurance different levels with that and that's all done through the online portal it's super easy to use it's affordable it's like literally a checkbox to get insurance if it's not you know going to be covered by local authorities or if you want to get a medical evacuation now if you have this and you want to get insurance as well there's private insurance and if you go to the website I have the links for all that stuff but if you just want to get a beacon to have an emergency throw in your pack and get this guy if you want a tool it's a little more interactive and you're okay with paying the subscription fee the inn reaches your move okay lastly I want to talk about like the form factor and the battery on these guys so they're both really small they're both really light here you can see they're small enough to fit in your pack in an unobtrusive way the inReach mini is about a hundred grams the bigger models weigh more obviously this is about a hundred and forty eight grams they're light enough that you can put them in your pack forget about them I actually carry both and I'll tell you why I do a little bit later but not too heavy the rugged they're built to withstand outdoors conditions let's talk about the battery because the battery is a bigger deal now on the AC our unit the battery is internal it's sealed in there it lasts for five years so you can put it in your backpack you can put a calendar reminder for five years from now to replace it and otherwise you don't have to worry about it now it will drain down the more tests that you do and it'll give you a message on the view that says your battery's low if you've done a lot of tests but there's not a reason to do a lot of tests and I'll show you that in a sec but that's the deal and when it does come time to replace the battery it's anywhere from a hundred bucks and up I replace the battery on my old unit I went to a marine service center and they did it in a couple days pretty simple but you could pay more and I'm sure as time goes on it's gonna cost more if you do have to replace the battery in five years it might be you know there might be a new version of the sound that's worth worth paying a little bit more for than just a battery but that's how this battery works now on the inReach devices they are all us be chargeable and it'll charge with any standard USB cable you can plug it in the wall plug it in your computer plug it into a battery pack but the inReach devices in general are multi-use devices right so you might be doing texting you might be broadcasting your track points you might be getting weather all of those things burn the battery down a bit so you just want to be conscious if you're burning the battery down and you want this in a rescue situation make sure you still have some juice left to communicate back and forth with the rescue authorities or if not just pack a very small USB well battery charger in your pack to give you that extra juice in case you need to have this for an emergency so those are the main differences both small and you know super easy to carry they both come with mounting clips as well worth mentioning you can mount clips on the back and put them onto your pack there's a multitude of ways that you can attach this to your gear in terms of actually using the AC our rescue link view there's not a whole lot you have to register it and there's some test modes and there's a very pretty simple way to deploy it and set off an alarm so let me just walk you through those things the first thing you need to do when you get your beacon is register it and it is a requirement that if you use the beacon you need to register it so if you are scared of Big Brother don't get a beacon it's pretty easy it's pretty straightforward there is a unique beacon ID on the unit itself and it's really easy to find you get that number to start and then you find your national beacon registration organization and if you go to the corresponding article that I have on hiking guide comm I have a link to all the countries you know registration systems I am the United States so we're going to go here I actually have an account already because I have registered other beacons so I'm going to go here I'm going to register a new beacon and I'm going to type in the beacon ID here next it's got my some of my information in here from before put my name my email my address I don't have to worry about any of this aside from the manufacturer so we're gonna say ACR again pretty straightforward plb usage this is where it gets juicy we're gonna say non-commercial hiking you can do whatever else you want to put in here no vehicle and additional data which is where it gets very helpful so I use this section to describe a little bit about Who I am what my experience level is how I generally hike and also what type of gear I have with me in terms of survival gear or shelter just in case I have to stay out overnight now when you signal a distress call the people in Mission Control Center match your beacon ID with this description and they'll look at this description and figure out the best course of action in terms of rescuing you based on what you put here so you can also update this if you're traveling different places so if you're doing a specific trip say like the GM JMT you can list your itinerary you can list your equipment whatever it might be you can keep this updated so that rescuers have a up-to-date picture of who you are and what you're doing so now I can do emergency contacts I'm going to put my wife in and I am done so I will get a letter in the mail and when I get that it comes with a little sticker and you just put that sticker right on your beacon and you're all set now some country is required that you update your beacon profile periodically usually two years so check with your country and yeah you should be all set here you can see my two PL B's that I have both active and again there's no cost to have these active you can have as many as you want active it's not a subscription-based service or anything you can just do what you need to do all right so let's go over the unit it's really pretty simple you have some mounts here for clips that come with the unit and then you can go to the website I'll show you what those are you have a little diagram on how to deploy the antenna the satellite antenna and this is actually the satellite antenna here on the front of the unit you have a digital readout and there's a model called the rescue link 400 that does not have this readout I'd recommend spending the extra couple bucks to get this this gives you some feedback on whether the GPS signal is acquired whether you're broadcasting what your battery is otherwise you have to decode the LED light which is right they are the LED light so just spend the extra couple bucks the old models they're sort of Achilles heel was that you didn't know what was happening you need to know what the battery level was you would just hit a button and hope that it works so now I know whether the battery is charged whether I'm getting GPS signal all that good stuff you have the distress button underneath this protective cover you have a test button here you have your GPS antenna here which actually gets your latitude and longitude and broadcasts it as part of your distress signal and then underneath you have your strobe so your visible and infrared strobe right there now if you want to deploy the antenna and actually do a distress call this is the catch for the antenna again an improvement over the other model you lift this up and you press this distress button and that's that's all there is to it you'll get some feedback on the screen telling you that a emergency is in progress you're getting the GPS signal it's broadcasting and what the battery life is you can see it's got a nice long antenna to communicate with the satellites so when you have the device there's two test modes so you want to test it just to make sure it's working you don't want to test it all of the time because the testing drains the battery down and then you have to replace the batteries sooner so you want to test it periodically I usually test it once a year and I just have a date in my calendar and to test it to do the self-test will do the GPS test next but to do the self-test deploy this and you hold the t button down for two to five seconds you'll see I got a flash there on the LED it's going through its test cycles there's a message and it passed the test so it's that simple that tests all the internal mechanisms to make sure that it's actually working now to do a GPS test it actually uses GPS and the Galileo constellation so there's two different ways it can get your position which is a cool feature but to do that test you're going to hold the test button down deploy the antenna keep this clear this is your GPS antenna here and to hold the test button down for five to ten seconds so one two three four five six seven there was the flash you can see I'm getting the GPS messages on there this is gonna take a little bit longer let me move this so I have a better view to the sky I'm also under a tree which never helps it's giving me my position there there's my latitude and longitude which is a handy feature if you're at an emergency and it passed you can see it also said the number of tests that I have left again that's because it drains the battery down so here's what I would recommend if you want to just buy a beacon that you don't pay for outside of the beacon cost you just put in your pack and you forget about it you don't care about texting or weather reports or any of that stuff then get an ACR get the ACR rescuing view this is the best of the pl B's that are out there right now definitely worth it if you want to text back and forth tell your family that you're okay maybe not signal a rescue maybe get you know more interactive rescue information like we mentioned before the forest fire or a medical emergency then an inReach device is probably a better bet for you when they do offer other functions and features which I have in all my other review so you can learn more about that there now if you have an older ACR unit this is an ACR rescue link plus and you need to replace the battery I would strongly suggest getting a new unit now if you look at the old unit versus the new unit the old one doesn't have the screen on there so the screen will give me feedback on what's happening with the device well there's a GPS signal my latitude and longitude which can also be helpful this guy won't so if it's gonna cost you say 150 bucks to upgrade the battery spend an extra 100 or 2 bucks to just get a new unit I think it's well worth it now what I do is I actually have both of these units because they're light because they're small I use both of them now I take my ACR and I put it in an emergency kit and my pack so if I need to signal a rescue with it I have to take it out of my pack I keep the inReach closer and I use this for like day-to-day texting I usually get weather reports and other more interactive features now my my rule and my workflow for these two things are having both of them as this if I'm in a situation where I'm in imminent death or or risk of death or risk of passing out losing a lot of blood I might not be in control of my body at some time very soon I'm gonna hit the button on this guy and kick off this type of rescue because I don't know if I'm gonna be conscious you know through the entire thing if I feel okay and I just have some medical problem or I want to talk about it I'll go with this first and I'll go talk to gos and I'll try to figure out ways to self evacuate or or solve the problem without involving other people and risking a search and rescue teams life to come and get me now if I do hit this I've actually programmed my beacon number and my information as a quick text message in the in reach so let's say I'm losing a lot of blood I'm kind of in and out of it I hit the button on this guy if I'm still with it I'm gonna go on my inner eh and I'm gonna do an SOS with gos and I'm gonna send my pre set message it says I just triggered my plb beacon number blah blah blah I might not be conscious for this whole period similar you know a shorter version of that is a quick text on here so that's my reasoning now it might seem excessive I for me a couple hundred ex you know a couple hundred bucks and a couple of hundred grams not even a couple hundred 148 extra grams in my pack is worth it to have the redundancy in case I need both of these and obviously if the inReach didn't work I would trigger this that's worth it to me to get home safe at the end of the day now one of the things that you probably haven't considered that happened to me that I didn't consider until it happened to me was you might need to use one of these devices for other hikers so I was hiking in the Sierras this was two years ago and I had an inner each device and I encountered a another hiker who had acute altitude sickness they were throwing up and they needed to get be evacuated so I used my Geo's service on the inReach to communicate with rescuers tell them what was happening I left my in reach with that hiker and then I hiked down to meet a ranger who I knew was farther down the trail and when I did that hike I had my ACR with me so if something happened to me on that trip I would have a way to trigger another emergency from there so something to consider it's not always you and you know systems fail so having some redundancy is good if you can if you can't you know if you want to communicate get the in reach if you want to just set it and forget it get the ACR please do go to my website where I have a companion article that has links and I go into more depth on all the topics that I've talked about here and if you have any questions please leave them in the comments on youtube I will do my best to answer them I usually answer every comments on my videos on YouTube if there's something you wanted me to cover that I didn't please ask the question there and I will cover it and I will add it to the website article if it is helpful for others and if you think I could do a better job please leave it there as well and if you have enjoyed this and you find it useful please just give me that little thumbs up on the YouTube video and that'll help other people find it and hopefully get a beacon and hike safely so thanks guys and I'll see out there

Channel: HikingGuy.com

Views: 53,478

Keywords: hiking, survial, resqlink, acr resqlink, resqlink+, acr resqlink 400, acr resqlink plb, acr resqlink review, acr resqlink unboxing, personal locator beacon, rescue, resqlink 2880, resqlink plus, resqlink+ plb, resqlink 28880 plb, acr electronics, survival, emergency, review, camping, fishing, boating, spot, distress radiobeacon, epirb, acr express, sailing, inreach, safety, acr 2880 resqlink non-buoyant plb - programmed for us registration, marine safety, survival skills

Id: raYCWJHleGM

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2019