I let my membership laps after the first month until my next outing. 3 days before my outing, I re-activated it using the inReach web site. This went smoothly. But then I couldn't figure out how to get the device itself to acknowledge that it had been re-activated. I brought up Earthmate on the phone and there were no obvious settings for this. I went to the device settings and told it to do a sync. I would have assumed this would update the iR mini to know it had been re-activated.
Everytime I'd power up the iR mini, it would give me the message I needed to activate it. If I pressed enter, it would just tell me to go to the website to activate it. I'd already done that!
I finally pressed the enter key to the message but that took me to a page giving the IME number and a code. I went back to the inreach website and tried to activate the device with that info, it just told me it had already been activated.
My bad, but every time I tried to get this working, I kept running into road blocks and would put it aside. Finally the day of my run at the trail head, I fire up the iR mini, same thing. I need to activate it. I try sending preset messages, but of course it says it can't.
I'm out of patience so head out on my run. Half an hour into my run I think I hear the noise that it sent a message (it's in the top of my hydration pack so can't hear it very well). I never did get any message to my email, but it was activated by the time I was done with my 3 hour run.
So I'm still a bit unclear about how this should work, but it would appear until you leave it outside with clear view of the sky, there is no way to actually activate the device, just your account.
This is another UI experience fail on the part of inReach. When the device is working, it works great. But I'm a pretty tech savy person (SDE by trade, tons of Garmin device experience) and this device has been absolutely terrible for ease of setup. I've spent way too much time trying to understand how this device should work. For a device that is needed in emergencies, the user interface from setup to actual usage should be dummy proof.
