German umlauts (äöüß) lead to unreadable messages on Mini 2

When I receive a text message containing any of the German special characters/umlauts (äöüß), the message becomes unreadable in two ways:

1) the special characters are replaced by a question mark in a diamond (�).
2) the inReach device no longer applied any line breaking after such a character is displayed.

It is especially the second issue with is fatal in the field: most of the part of the message after an umlaut is no longer displayed at all on the device because it just runs off the screen. A real issue if the inReach is used without a phone.

Some more details:

The messages were sent by replying to a text message using both, Android and Apple phones. When looking at the received messages on the Explorer app, only problem 1 occurs and the characters are replaced by a question mark in a diamond (�). Thus, it is usually possible to guess what was written.

If the message also contains an emoji, the umlauts are received and displayed correctly everywhere and there are no problems.

Below is a picture which shows how the Mini 2 displays the following two test messages:
“Umlauts äöü and sharp s ß. And now we add some text to create a longer line which requires line breaking.”
”Umlauts äöü with smiley ”

And here is how the Explorer app shows the messages:

0 Garmin-Leslie over 1 year ago

I am not able to duplicate the issue on my end. I did messages exactly as you explained and they showed up correctly. Can you verify the software is up to date? Updating and Syncing an inReach Mini 2

0 Kosta over 1 year ago in reply to Garmin-Leslie

Hello Leslie,

Thank you for your reply.

I’ve got all available updates installed and the device says “Software Version 3.28 (747479)”.

I just made another test. If I send the message through the website the umlauts come up correctly. The issue only comes up when I send the message as text message using a mobile phone. This was tested using two different phones on two different phone networks in Australia:

1: An iPhone using the Optus network in Australia.
2: An Android (Pixel) phone using the Telstra network in Australia.

In each case the text message was sent to an Australian phone number as a reply to an inReach message.

So the issue with the letters being garbled is likely to happen somewhere at the gateway between the phone and inReach network.

However, there is still the issue with the line-breaks on the device itself: when the inReach receives a message which has an invalid character for whatever reason, it doesn’t perform any line breaking after the faulty character is displayed (question mark in a diamond �). The inReach should be able to show the whole message on the screen even if individual letters can’t be displayed correctly.

I believe the line breaking issue should be addressed in a firmware update to ensure messages can be understood even if something goes wrong wirth the encoding and some letters are garbled.