I 'ver just seen the Yellowbrick advertisement in the latest FF, so I looked at their website. It seems to have come of age. No longer a Big Yellow Brick, but a small, rugged device with minimal power consumption, and a sensible purchase price, monthly fee and usage structure. It would give me what I 'm looking for - the ability to keep the folks back home aware of my position, and to send and receive SMS-style messages, when out of range of 3G.
I 'm tempted.
Is anyone using one?
David.

Paul,
I 'd agree that battery life per se is not an issue. It 's more that having to remember to do something manually might be - switch on, switch off, change the batteries... The more I can eliminate my human errors, the better.

I 'm thinking of the folks who use an SSB to send a daily message "I 'm OK", and then one day that message doesn 't get sent, for some trivial reason (bad connection, corroded wire) and then the folks shoreside phone the Coastguard, and set a rescue mission going. It happens.

I 'd say that just to send my noon position is quite often enough for the tracker to be operational, but I might want to receive messages more frequently.

Yes, Mike Richey told me that on his annual trip across the Atlantic in Jester,, he would switch his GPS on for 5 minutes at noon, just to check the fix he was getting from whatever esoteric, archaic navigation tools and methods he was experimenting with - and made the batteries last for the whole passage.