Phantom texts from powered off (for days) inReach Explorer+, Mon, Mar 8 2021

Some messages were delayed between March 3 and March 8. It does sometimes happen that messages get delayed in the Garmin server works (or in the Iridium mesh network, although that seems anecdotally much less frequent).

I see that Garmin has revamped the Explore sign-in page yet again. You can check status by clicking the giant question mark in the upper right corner, then choose the "system status" option at the bottom of the flyout menu. That takes you here:

https://status.inreach.garmin.com/

From there, you can subscribe to email status notifications. You can also see the current status, as well status history for the most recent 90 days.

Note that some "incidents" - including the March 3-March 8 delays - are NOT reflected in the colored bars (although you can sometimes reveal this magic if you hover over green bars). Best to scroll down to the incident list below all the pretty graphics.

Wow, that is interesting....  didn’t know about reliability issues from any reading prior to purchasing the Explorer+.  I’d like a Garmin employee to answer, “Would this delay also have affected emergency messages?”  or strictly the three pre-stored messages...  I know Garmin can’t guarantee that the Iridium is always working, or that an accidental cut of a fiber cable somewhere might cause a delay, but I’d expect some very high reliability numbers in this system, and not a Mar 3 - 8 some outage/message delay situation...  CM

I don't know what the difference is in back end processing. But SOS messages are highly reliable. Might just be that the monitoring team pays a lot more attention to that traffic. Or it could be entirely different processing.