Receiving Messages with Extended Tracking

Message reception is a complicated thing - balancing act between battery life and responsiveness. There are passive and active checks. We’ll ignore passive because those are a crap shoot and rarely work.

An active check involves asking the Iridium network if there are messages waiting, receiving a definitive yes/no answer, and downloading messages if there are any. Active checks occur on device boot, when the unit sends something such as a track point or message, when you manually request a check, and once an hour.

According to the manual, message checking is disabled entirely in extended tracking mode. If that is literally true, then it’s not a matter of not being notified. It’s a matter of the unit not knowing that there are messages. 

Although I’ve never tested it, my guess would be that the unit does an active check when you wake it up. You’ll be able to tell by going to the manual message check page immediately after waking the device. It’ll say check in progress if one has already been started.

Do you have a garmin watch that is paired?  I wonder if that would give some indication that you got a message even when the InReach is asleep.

I can answer that. The watch doesn't know anything more than device.

Thanks for your answer and sorry so long in responding. 

I did read that message checking was disabled in extended tracking mode; however, what I was finding when I turned the device back on is that it has actually already downloaded the messages. I presume this occurs when it sends out its periodic track point. I have the device configured to ring until I actually look at received messages, and it starts ringing immediately when I turn it on and there is a received message. That's why I thought it would be a great if you could be notified when it pulled down a message while operating in extended tracking mode.

Yes, there is an active message check when a track point is sent. I would expect that sending those would be one of the first things to happen when you wake the device up. But I've never tried to systematically determine that.

You can basically achieve exactly what you are describing if instead of using "extended tracking" you can just turn all sensors off, and set the logging to off and then set the tracking to 30 min/1 hr/2hr  ect....  This will allow the messages to come in once every hour and when the track get sent based off your settings.  This will use slightly more battery life but not much more. 

Thanks for your reply.

I was specifically using "extended tracking" for maximum preservation of battery life when away from recharging opportunities for many days. However, it would be a good idea to do some battery consumption comparisons between extended tracking mode and regular tracking mode with all sensors turned off, and I will try to do that testing. As I mentioned above, I was particularly pleased that the battery still had a 40% charge left after using it for ten days in extended tracking mode.

Not quite the same. At a minimum, the difference in message handling incurs more power use this way.