How to share Garmin inReach

A friend of mine just borrowed one to do the JMT.  He covered the monthly cost and changed who got the alerts, but it still showed the “true” owner on the trail and it was the owner’s inReach mapsite that was updated.  Unless you have dozens of contacts, just let him take it and replace the contacts with the people to whom he wants to send messages.

Ok thanks Kevin. Do you know if he just synced the inreach to the Earthmate app on his phone?

I’m pretty sure he did, but I don’t think he used the Earthmate app at all. Since they were out for 14 days battery consumption was a concern. As I was watching their progress on the JMT I could see that pretty clearly. They had the tracking turned on sending updates every 10 minutes the first 6 days of the trip until they got to VVR and could recharge everything. The second half of their trip they turned off tracking and used it to send just two messages a day: “Starting out for the day” and “Setting up camp for the night”. I don’t know how much battery he had left but he did say that he was concerned about the amount of overall “juice” he had left towards the end of the trip. I think he was using his cell phone for photos and didn’t want to miss the photo op at the top of Mt Whitney at the end of the trip.

You’re thinking of loaning it to someone you trust…Just change your inReach.com password to something you don’t mind sharing and I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to do what they need to and then you can restore your password when you get the unit back. I had offered him mine but he has a local friend who offered so I didn’t have to bother shipping mine.

Maybe late to the party here, but I’d think it’s simply a matter of changing contacts in explore.garmin.com and then syncing that new info to the inReach.

The unit will always show up as “yours” though.

I forgot to mention that I have the inreach mini. Not sure if that changes anything. I went and changed the contacts. Now I’m order for him to make custom texts he would just need to download the Earthmate app and then pair the inreach with his phone??

Either that or teach them to use the Scroll-text feature built into the inReach.  If they’re not going to send many custom texts that’s not a bad way to go.

Also there’s the 3 preset messages and up to 20 Quick messages that don’t require entering text.  That’s a pretty good spread.  How many/how often are they planning on sending custom texts?