Severe weather or other safety alerts to your inReach, Zoleo, etc.

[Wandering Bison]

Hey everyone,

As an avid hiker, biker, paddler and traveller of the backcountry, I developed a service that I thought might interest this community. I'm looking for people like you to test the service and provide feedback.

This is not a sales pitch or a trial offer - I need you to try the service for free and let me know what we got right and messed up. But first, a little context;

Almost three years ago, my travels took me to Cape Scott Provincial Park, at the northern end of Vancouver Island, a stunning remote area on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, where I spent a week. While there, I realized I would have had no way of getting notified of a distant earthquake and the resulting tsunami. My Garmin inReach would have allowed me to call for help in an emergency or to get a current forecast, but it couldn't alert me in the case of an immediate risk. Imagine a similar situation in an area at risk from flash flooding, forest fires or a tornado. When I got back to civilization, I tried to find a solution. Surprisingly, no one offered a notification solution using a satellite device like inReach!

So, I founded a company called Adiona Alert to provide the service I needed but couldn't find.

After more than two years of work, including testing the service over the last six months throughout North America and issuing over 2000 safety alerts, including severe weather, to our small fleet of test devices, we are beginning to invite people to join our Early Access program so they can start using the service today for free!

Given where your adventures likely take you, I thought this community would be perfect to test the service. I would be honoured if you would consider signing up for the Early Access program.

As we slowly add small groups of users, It would be great if some of you would apply for our Early Access program. You would get these potentially live-saving alerts for free. All I ask in return is to share with my team and me your thoughts, suggestions and even complaints so we can improve the solution.

I would love you to visit our website - AdionaAlert.com, to learn more and apply for our Early Access program.

Thanks for considering this, and let me know if you have any questions or concerns.


J.S.

 

[foulhooked]

Is/will this be available for satellite-messaging-capable cell phones as well?

 

[Wandering Bison]

Is/will this be available for satellite-messaging-capable cell phones as well?

Great question, foulhooked!

The short answer is no, not currently.

The longer answer is that we don't currently know of any satellite messaging capable service that could allow us to extend our service to these cell phones … yet.

Here's the challenge - we need to continuously monitor your location, which requires your device to transmit over the only network available in the community we are trying to serve, a satellite network.

We then need to be able to send your device a message advising you of the severe weather or another safety risk (think wildfire, tsunami, etc.) once an alert is issued or when your travels take you to an area where an alert is already in place.

Currently, this is impossible with one of the more recent iPhones, capable of sending an emergency or check-in message using the Globestar satellite network and some of the newest Android phones over the Iridium satellite network, which can only send and receive limited text messages once held up and aligned with the passing satellites.

Generally, the four impediments are:

• Requires that your phone be pointed specifically at the passing satellite since the device is not equipped with a "large" enough omnidirectional antenna to establish a connection to the satellites passing over you just hanging on your backpack straps, etc.
• Sometimes, the service is limited to specific messages, such as the Apple emergency SOS messages, as a series of predetermined messages sent and received using very short code/data strings.
• In other instances, such as some of the newest Android announced capabilities, short text messages, such as the 160-character SMS messages of the early days of cellular phones, which are specific send and receive actions and not an application using short burst data, such as what the devices we currently support do over the Iridium network.
• Lastly, the current services are pretty limited and expensive for the user and/or provider on devices that aren't designed to continuously report their positions and listen for messages sent to them.

Don't get me wrong; the new functionality an iPhone 14 or 15 provides to allow you to send an SOS when you are in trouble is life-saving! It is just not likely to meet the more demanding requirements of many users who travel regularly in the backcountry. It's part device design and capability, including battery life, part use case driven.

We have designed our solution to be platform agnostic and have tested or will be testing several more solution providers over the coming months and as users request them. We also look forward to the day when our solution is available on your smartphone … it's just still a few years away.

These are exciting times and things are evolving very quickly! Only a few years ago, the service provided by Starlink was almost impossible to imagine.

If you have a device like the Motorola Defy, ACR Bivy Stick, Somewhere, etc., I encourage you to sign up for our Early Access program and let us know your current device. If you are an iPhone or Android user, subscribe to our mailing list or watch our website.

As soon as we believe we can provide reliable and timely alerts to users on additional devices, we will begin testing these new devices.


J.S.