Will Garmin inReach devices accept virtual phone numbers as approved recipient / sender?

I have a suspicion that Garmin will not accept virtual mobile numbers as an approved recipient / sender?

Our company have a crisis staff solution where we send SMS alerts with virtual phone numbers so that personnel who are part of the crisis staff will receive SMS notification.

But none of our Garmin inReach devices are receiving the SMS notifications.

Please advise!

BR

Kristian Pettersen

Top Replies

Garmin-Andrew over 4 years ago +2 verified

As outlined in our Support Center article, Send a Message to an inReach Device, there are four ways to send a message to an inReach device: 1.) Replying to an inReach SMS message; 2.) Replying to an inReach…

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0 twolpert over 4 years ago

Best bet is to open a call with tech support. There are a lot of moving parts in the SMS delivery chain. In particular, Garmin uses third-party SMS gateways as intermediaries between the Garmin servers and the recipient's cell phone provider. I'm not sure how the gateways interact with virtual phone numbers. This might even depend on the particular gateway provider.

+1 Garmin-Andrew over 4 years ago

As outlined in our Support Center article, Send a Message to an inReach Device, there are four ways to send a message to an inReach device: 1.) Replying to an inReach SMS message; 2.) Replying to an inReach email message; 3.) Sending a message through the inReach MapShare page; or 4.), Using inReach to inReach Communication. Basically, the only way to send a message directly to an inReach device without first receiving a message from the device, would be to send the message from the MapShare page.

Are you sending messages from the virtual mobile numbers with one of these methods (other than inReach to inReach communication)? If so, there is still a chance the virtual numbers are getting flagged by the third-party SMS gateways twolpert mentioned.

If the messages aren't being received using one of the methods above, the best thing to do would be to contact Product Support so we can assist you with this directly.

0 twolpert over 4 years ago

Sorry, I read this backwards the first time. I thought the problem was that SMS messages originating on the iR devices were not reaching virtual number recipients. My apologies.

To elaborate a bit on Garmin-Niklas' answer, no iR device has a dedicated phone number of any kind. When you receive an SMS message that originated on an iR device, the phone number you see is the one that the gateway used to send the message to your cell phone provider. That number is not fixed. It can vary from message to message.

While you can reply to that message immediately, you cannot do so indefinitely. The Garmin servers retain the necessary information for a limited time. The time is unknown, but it's on the order of weeks. The conventional wisdom is to periodically "prime the pump" by sending a fresh message from the iR device to each person who needs to be able to contact that device directly.

In the more typical back country use scenario, most of us prime the pump immediately before each trip. I'm not sure when you would do that in your scenario, but it's the only way to guarantee that a given phone can send a message to the iR device from the SMS messaging app. Otherwise you are limited to email, MapShare, or iR-to-iR as Niklas described.

0 Niterider4 over 4 years ago in reply to twolpert

twolpert said:
Otherwise you are limited to email, MapShare, or iR-to-iR as Niklas described

I could be wrong, but I believe that email is the same as SMS, in that you can only reply by email to an inReach email - you cannot send an email to the inReach without first receiving an email from the inReach.

A possible solution to your problem would be for every inReach device to send your SMS server a SMS message once a week, and then program your SMS server to reply to those messages, rather than initiate a new SMS message.

Edit: you could include the name of the sender in the weekly inReach message, so replying to particular people is easy.

0 twolpert over 4 years ago in reply to Niterider4

An email received from an iR device is not the same as an SMS with regard to the reply. You cannot reply to the received email and expect the reply to reach the iR device. You must use the link in the message to go to a web page to send your reply.

The iR device does not have an email address at all. The thing that looks like an email address - [email protected] - is not. That is useful only for direct iR to iR messaging.

That point that I was trying to make - poorly - is that periodically priming the pump so that phones can send replies directly to the iR device is the only thing that works that way. If you don't or can't do that, then you must use one of the other three techniques as described by Garmin-Niklas. And the linked support article.