Just purchased and activated an SE+. Despite multiple attempts, I am unable to send SMS messages. I can send/receive to email addresses without any difficulty. Any suggestions?
Make sure that you include the country code (1 for the US) with the phone numbers.
Check the Inbox tab on your account at inreach.garmin.com. This will tell you whether or not the messages made it as far as the Garmin servers. If not, the issue is between the iR and the Iridium network. This seems unlikely given that you can send messages to e-mail addresses. If they made it to the Garmin servers, the problem is likely with the phone numbers themselves.
If you are sending to contacts that you set up on the inreach.garmin.com site (as opposed to using literal phone numbers when you compose/send the SMS), do a wired sync and then try again. When sent from the iR, destinations of messages to contacts are identified by a short ID number rather than by the full phone number. If the device and the servers do not agree on the ID numbers, the message may be mis-routed or not delivered at all. The wired sync should ensure that the device and servers agree on the meaning of the ID numbers.
Thanks for the info. The messages are making it to my inbox. I have tried typing the phone numbers in directly and also sending from my contacts list following a wired sync with the same results (only emails going through).
I have the same issue with my explorer plus. Everything was working fine until yesterday when I noticed that I can only receive SMS but not send (when using an ATT phone). This is despite the fact that I got the sent confirmation notice and the sent message shows up in my website inbox. However, the SMS messages are not being delivered to my ATT phone (tried 3 different ATT phones of my family members-none work). Oddly though, the SMS works fine (both sending and receiving) when I use my Iridium extreme SAT phone. The sending just does not work to my ATT Samsung (although I can receive SMS from it!). I am puzzled by this. Everything was working fine 2 days ago.
I am having the same issue with my inReach mini. The issue started yesterday. I sent messages to 6 different phone numbers and the messages were only delivered to 2 numbers.
All the messages show up as sent in my Inbox tab on My Account. I used the US country code on all numbers.
Of the 4 numbers that did not receive the text, 3 were AT&T and 1 was Verizon. And one of the AT&T numbers had received a text from the inReach mini last week.
I did notice that the last reported outage was August 25. However that status page did not explain how to report an outage. I tried calling tech support but they are not available on weekends.
I am glad this is basically testing and not an emergency. And I guess I'll try to only have emergencies during tech support hours.
There should be an alert or something to let people know something is not working properly. Found out the hard way while hiking and none of my SMS came through. Garmin is a $ 12 billion company. Amazing actually that they don't have tech support on the weekends where people probably need it the most. Will let you know the feedback from the support team once I called in.
Not that it does you any good from the field, but you can view the status of the various inReach service components from inreach.garmin.com. Look for and click the status icon in the upper right corner of the screen, just under the help question mark and the user avatar.
Of course, according to the status board, the last partial outage of SMS services was August 25. FWIW, there are other non-Garmin components involved here. Notably the SMS gateways, which are handled on a contract basis by third parties.
Thanks, good advice. My SMS started working again this afternoon and I saw their partial system outage notice for ATT customers on their status page. Good place to check before going on hikes (unless something happens on the weekend). Will always double check before I leave for a hike. They probably got calls by the thousands this morning...
