Garmin 66i with inReach Satellite Communication. The BEST satellite communicator on the market?

hey what's up guys welcome back to the channel and welcome to another episode of gear and beer will we talk about adventure motorcycle and camping gear all while enjoying a beer together in today's episode we're talking about the Garmin 66 I it's their newest version of the inReach it's got Maps it's got communication and I must show you how this little device here can keep you connected while you're out on your next adventure stay tuned alright guys so we have the Garmin 66 I hear and as I said is that it is the new version of their inReach technology it's got communication that's got excellent mapping but first I'm gonna talk about the beer today's beer simple it is from ballast point brewery out of San Diego California it is a lager and it's only 99 calories you know it's summer we're trying to watch our figures right if this is basically a glorified light beer so I've had a couple of these already not today but in the last couple of days and it's a pretty good beer it's really it's kind of a glorified Bud Light Coors Light Miller Lite it's just a your typical lager only 99 calories but it is in my opinion better than those other domestic beers you know it is a micro brew so it should be better right but go ahead and crack this open little foamy from riding in the bike yeah it's just super refreshing right here on the can it says bright refreshing and fit for adventure so just a perfect fit for this channel and again it's just a light kind of an all-day beer right you're not gonna have one of these and then just feel blah or you know just heavy afterwards it's a nice and it's even light it even has a really light alcohol content 3.5 carbs all that good stuff like we all worry about when we're drinking our beers right but again it's just a good summer or a late spring beer or just one to bring out with you at when you're at camp and it one that you can drink around the campfire and then not just feel crappy after one or two of them but yeah let's go ahead and get into this Garmin so let me just start with that I've had several of these satellite communication devices in the last ten years or so I started out with a spot and then I had a spot gen3 and then from there I went to the I think I had the spot connect which was a very like first version of the satellite communications with being able to use text messaging from your phone and then from there I went to the spot X which was like the newest which is the newest version of the spot where you hit has a little Cory keyboard on it you can type out you know messages that way and it didn't have the option to connect it to your phone the current version of the spot X does have that ability but in my opinion it's just not as good as the Garmin about oh five months ago I picked up this Garmin 66 I and the reason I went with the 66 I over the standard n reach is that the in reach is awesome and they're essentially the same thing this one is quite a bit more expensive but it has way better mapping than what the int the standard n reach or the N reach plus does so the Garmin 66i has a much bigger screen than what the government in reach explored plus or the standard n reach does in my opinion it's way way faster than the standard n reach after playing with them both side by side and the mapping is definitely superior to what the regular garment and reach or the N reach plus is now this is not my main mode of GPS or wayfinding on the motorcycle I actually use two other options which are my trail tech Voyager Pro which has excellent mapping prior to using the Voyager pro I use an app called Gaia GPS on my cell phone and it is excellent I still use that today as kind of my big picture map I'll be running the Voyager pro as my main form of wayfinding and then I use the the Gaia GPS as the big picture where I can see a larger area so it's a zoomed out version of where we are on the map I will do in another video on this versus those other two forms of GPS in the future I get a lot of questions I've had a lot of questions about what apps I use and all that stuff so I will definitely do a video on that soon kind of comparing the two or the three and showing you the differences in all three of those the garmin 66 ayah let's go ahead and get into that the garmin 66 series is Gorman's best handheld gps now the main reason i went with the 66 I over the N reach was again the mapping now I say that because I also do a lot of hiking mountain biking and stuff like that and I will be using this as the standalone GPS during those other activities so it's it's nice to be able to use it for multiple activities now you can see here the map it's very detailed and you can it's it comes preloaded with all us maps or North America maps if you buy the North America version if you buy the European version then it also comes with pre-loaded maps there as well I know the you can't see very well on this right now but I'll do my best here to kind of show you what the some of the features are the inReach button the SOS here is protected by this little cover and it is very easy to get to you just move this cover out the way smash that button and the cavalry will come when you go into your menu you have your dashboard your main menu here and it's got things like your set up tracking SOS you can send mess 2-way messages you have your inrease utilities just a ton of different features I'm not gonna go into him all now but you also have a bird's eye view which is a a satellite view of your current area you can get active weather current weather that's going on in your area now getting into some of the inReach features like all other n reaches there is a service plan depending on how many text messages you want to send and all that there is an unlimited plan for I think about $50 a month and the cool thing about this is if you know you're not going to be doing any activities you can actually turn it off that's where you're not paying at every single month or you can pay just like the minimum service to keep it going just just to have in your vehicle that's kind of an emergency but if you're gonna be going on a trip like I am next month in July and I'm gonna be using this a lot you can go with the unlimited plan pay that $50 for that one month and then when August rolls around when I'm done with it I can go back down to the lower plan and there's no additional charge for that which i think is really cool again as I said there's a portion on here for active weather you can either do it through Wi-Fi Bluetooth or you can use it through the messaging and they can send you a message of your web for the current euro of your current location another really cool feature as I mentioned a minute ago any option that you would have on any other Garmin GPS totally available on here just like if you are doing like the site and goes or if you were doing points of interest you could have points of interest beyond their its other it's got other simple things like an altimeter trip computer compass again you can go straight into your messages and there's all the messages here that I've sent in the last few trips which is really neat but let me show you the app version of this as well so on my phone here I've got the Garmin Connect app and the Explorer app the Explorer app is the main app you used with the GPS and when you go into the the app here you have things like weather tracking SOS everything that you could use on the Garmin you can use on here going into the dashboard down here at the bottom you have your messages now my absolute favorite thing about the the connectivity from your phone to your Garmin is that when you send a message on your Garmin and let me just if I can just show you this really quick we go to just a new message I'll go to type you basically have the old-school cellphone style keyboard where you have to kind of go over and one letter at a time and it does do a pretty good job of guessing what word you're trying to type so it makes it a little bit quicker but it takes a really long time now you do have you have two options of quick text where you can have predetermined quick text that you can send out like hey I made it or I'll be home soon certain ones like that that you can just do automatically without typing in specific messages or customizable messages but if you want to send out a customized message then you have to do it either on here with the letter by letter or my favorite thing is that you can go into the phone and it gives you the interface just like you would on your iPhone or Android phone so you can go here and click on your two and type in it loads all of your contacts so you could pick a contact we will just pick pick my wife and then you literally just type in hey how's it going and you could hit sin and I know this is kind of a it's not real clear guys but you can kind of get the gist it's just like the same interface as if you were sending text messages through iMessage or through an Android device you hit send it pairs with your phone and then sends the message using the satellite signal I've noticed that the first time you send a message it takes somewhere around 30 seconds to send but once you've kind of activated that message stream to and messages to and from are very fast way faster than what I noticed with the spot X I could I could send a text message back and forth in the middle of nowhere with no service whatsoever back and forth to my wife or to friends and it I mean it's just as if you had service it's that quick I mean you're talking ten seconds at most from the time you hit Send to the time it's received and it does give you a little tone when the message is actually sent successfully so you know that the message has actually gone out and been sent obviously there's certain things there certain factors that will determine if that's going to go out fast or not a clear view of the sky is always important when you have a GPS device and then just you know what if you're down in a canyon or anything else like that that's gonna really determine how fast messages go out but I have noticed in my experience over using this for the last few months that once you establish that initial connection messaging back and forth is very fast so kind of let's go back to talking about messages here customizable messages depending on what your plan is if you're not on the unlimited plan you have a certain amount of customizable messages that you can send out each month now that's just standard text messages that you would send out that are that are not predetermined now Garmin does allow you to have your quick text your predetermined messages at no charge and I think you get somewhere around five or ten of those that you can send out for free and as many times as you want whether you determine what that message may be like hey I'm on my way or whatever you can determine that message to be you can set it up in your account and I think that's really cool because I do notice that I send a lot of the same messages over and over again throughout a trip so it's nice to have that ability to just send that and not have it count towards my my lump of messages that I have each month clicking the Explorer app you can basically see everything that you've got that you would see map wise on the garment itself one thing in Kula since these two kind of since these do Bluetooth together whenever you get notifications on your phone you also get notifications on your Garmin telling you what the notification is for instance if you have an Instagram notification it'll tell you on there what the what the notification is on your Garmin which isn't that big of a deal but I just think it's kind of a neat feature but as far as the mapping goes anything that you put on here automatically syncs to your phone and vice versa to where you could have this mounted to your bike or you can have it mounted or in a backpack or something like that and you could use just your phone if you wanted to or vice versa you could have your phone in there and still get notifications on your Garmin okay so some of the pros and cons with this pros you know I love the mapping on it it's really really good for what I do with hiking and biking and stuff like that for motorcycling in my opinion it's a the screen is just a little bit small and you can see that the the glare issue we're having here with the camera it does get a bit of a glare now I do have a screen protector on here and part of that glare is from the screen protector so it wouldn't probably be as bad if I didn't have that glass screen protector on there but you got to protect your device so maybe there other screen protectors out there that don't have the the glare is bad but this is the one I have and this is the kind of the calm that I've noticed with this one other pros the text messaging I absolutely love that to be able to check in because so many times I mean I went on a week-long trip last month and throughout that entire week I only had service when I got close to highways or the small towns that I went food to get fuel but every single night I didn't have service at camp so it was just nice to let you know your loved ones know that you you made it okay and you're done for the night that way you know people can rest easy knowing that you're not still out in the woods or you're stuck or whatever else you know so the the interface back and forth between the two the the Bluetooth capability with the phone and the and the Garmin are awesome again and that the the amount or the speed at which it sends the text messages is great because my spot X it would take fifteen to twenty minutes sometimes it wasn't like that all the time but it seemed like the time that you needed to get a message out a text message out was when it took the longest and it just seemed to be like the worst case scenario but with was so far with the Garmin 66 I I have not noticed that at all it's been very quick every single time and I've also noticed that since there are it uses a different satellite system it's got way more satellites so that I think that's just why it sends out so much faster I almost always have a really good signal even under tree cover and stuff like that so other than the mapping and the text messages I like the fact that you can get weather on this because again not knowing in certain parts of the state whenever you're traveling not knowing exactly where you are as far as being able to look at or if you have don't have any service to look and see what the weather is gonna be like overnight it this device can tell you what the weather isn't it be that way you know how cold it's gonna be that night certain things like that just little useful things that are in this device that you wouldn't normally think about until you have the capability of being able to use it now the only con that I can think of with the Garmin 66i is the battery life it's not awful but they say that you're supposed to get I think 24 hours of continuous service out of it I'll look that up and leave it leave it in the comments below or somewhere right here on the screen but I have noticed that I pretty much if I have it running all day tracking and sitting messages that I pretty much need to charge it at camp that night so it will last me all day the next day if I don't do that then I'll have to plug it in while I'm writing and it it becomes kind of cumbersome so really about 12 to 14 hours of continuous use is about as good as I as I've gotten now some of the other little features on here that are kind of neat and useful just as kind of a bonus here to throw out you can always it's got its stopwatch it has a flashlight on it calculator it's got them the sunrise the moon moonrise you can take photos with your phone and send them to here and put them on the map that way say a year or so from now you can see what the point of interest that you marked was and have a photo there to kind of describe what that point of interest was I think is really neat the calendar this little things like that is just really cool if you're into geocaching it's got geocaching on here which i think is really cool you do have to register through their website but it will show you any geocache that's in your area so I found out not that long ago that there's two geocaches within a mile of my house that I had no idea if you're in a geocaching a lot of people who have adventure bikes or in a geocaching because it's just a way to something to do while you're out on your bike so to have the ability to do geocaching through this is I think pretty sweet so just a little tidbit there and then a little bonus and then some little things in the setup you can set up your ringtones and things like that you do get your own phone number with this so it's an actual standard ten digit phone number that you get when you you send messages back and forth so then that person can then save that phone number into their contacts as you know Kyle's GPS and whenever they're whenever you're out on a trip they can text you and it's just like an additional satellite phone or anything like that now lastly one of my favorite things about this device is that when you do send a text message you have the opportunity to tag your location so it sends a link with your message and it will show the person that you send the message to an exact Google Earth location of where you are so that's pretty neat so and in the event that there was a non-emergency but you needed help maybe you broke down in the middle of woods don't grab a truck and come bring it to you to help you get your bike out which wouldn't happen with the Honda but you know if you had another bike that did break down you have the ability to send that location of where you are and they can come find you so you can get out of the woods and head home well that about does it this was my quick overview of the Garmin 66 I I hope that answers any questions that you may have had about this device I've had a lot of questions from you guys in the past about what this is and how I like it so I hope that this answers your questions if you have any additional questions please leave me a comment down below I love talking to you guys and answered all your questions also if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and again let me know down in the comments what you'd like to see in the future if you haven't yet please hit that subscribe button as well as that Bell icon that way you know when new videos like this are released I've almost made it to 10,000 subscribers at the time of this video and I'm so pumped about that I'm only about 900 away and I can't wait to hit that point it's just kind of a goal I've had for a while and I will be doing a giveaway so make sure and check out Instagram and the Facebook to make sure that you are able to enter in on that 10,000 subscriber giveaway that I'll be doing anyway guys thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Backcountry Adventure Motorsports

Views: 30,774

Rating: 4.6711593 out of 5

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Id: RoQ7LhZEvMI

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020