My garmin inreach mini died

Mine hasn’t died yet, but I have tested my iPhone for satellite messaging. It does work, but requires some TLC to acquire the low earth orbit satellites and I found that it didn’t work very well in some locations, because you need line-of-sight. I like the phone as a back up, but the InReach is still superior IMO.

Then maybe I’ll just be lazy and keep my inreach mini and current phone for the time being.

I also have the mini and have thought about upgrading but haven’t. It’s worked so far but I’ve worried as it got older that something like a battery or other failure might occur. I’ve used the satellite messaging on my iPhone 14 and it worked. The don’t think it’s on par with a working InReach.

My inreach mini wouldn’t keep a charge for very long so I replaced the battery.  It was a bit of a challenge but youtube video made it pretty clear.  It’s more difficult than just replacing a regular battery.

Bit the bullet and got the Mini 3+ and it’s really something else. Slightly bigger and heavier but my texts typically go through in seconds. Images in a minute or two. Note the 3+ uses the more recent Iridium Next constellation and the plain 3 doesn’t, which is weird so I think the extra $50 is worth it. Love the touch screen and voice commands enough to actually use it stand alone for messages. OG Mini was famously painful to use stand alone. Voice messages is really neat too.

Stuff I don’t like: The image sharing is cool but the receiving side needs to download the Garmin Messenger or Explore to see them, so that’s dumb.

And Garmin has purposely hamstrung the built-in map app. There is no technological reason for it not to actually have a map background overlay. The screen has decent resolution and is full color. Pure rent seeking IMHO.

I think it’s the best device out there until on-phone sat gets more developed. Even then, this thing lives unprotected on my chest and has floated in lakes, something I wouldn’t want to do with a phone so I’ll probably milk it for a decade or so. I thought it was a worthy upgrade for the network speed and security alone.

Last week returned from backpacking trip in Pyrenees (Andorra – France – Catalonia) .

I have the 1st generation of InReach Mini. Always worked well. But in this trip after clouds closed and some rain began – not a single message went through.

My son with his IPhone 17 Pro sent location to my wife without any issues.

I don’t know – should I still carry InReach? Should I replace it with something else? It’s quite frustrating to carry it, charge it off a powerbank and then realize it is useless…

BTW, after the skies cleared all messages went through. I took it to numerous trips and it worked better. Maybe it is indeed dying?

I have a mini 2 , I’ve never had any issues – but I’ve also never even tried to send any messages with it, or use it for navigation or tracking. I have only ever used it for weather forecasts, which has been pretty handy at times. I have an Iphone 16 and I use that to send my wife ok messages at the end of each day. I keep carrying the inreach for two reasons: the weather forecasts, and I figure If I take a serious fall that would cause injuries bad enough to need rescue, the inreach mini is much more likely to still be working afterward than the phone. I have yet to find myself in a situation where the Iphone could not connect to a satellite, even down in some pretty deep, forested canyons. Takes a while sometimes, but I’ve always gotten a message out. I’ll be in the Grand Canyon in October , if it connects when I’m down at the river then that should be close to the ultimate test.

The inreach mini has this weird antennae sticking out of the top of it.

I wonder if that gives better reception than a phone.

The issue I have with using the iPhone is two fold. One, you have to hold and orient it to the sky to potentially get it to work, not every time but most of the time when I’ve tested it. If I’m injured there’s no guarantee I’ll be capable of doing that, and nearly 100% of my trips are solo during low times of the year. The other issue is being able to receive communication from home. On a trip a few years ago, I literally replanned the morning I was leaving due to forest fire smoke ruining  my original plan. Then while enjoying my second option I got a message from home, the forest smoke was going to be in my location in less than 24hrs. I cut the trip short and still managed to ran jnto the smoke on my way home and it was bad. I’ll carry a dedicated device that has a better antenna an a stronger receiver for now, its worth the weight.

During an early August 2026 hike of the 100-Mile Wilderness of the AT I noticed the following: 1) My InReach Mini 2 didn’t always send and receive texts timely. Often, I received notices of message send failures. A couple of times texts I sent early in the evening (6PM) were sent the next morning. I think these results were because of the trees and the mountains, even though I was trying to send from clearings (e.g., standing on a rock in the middle of a river with a view of the sky, or a mountain summit). I was able to get a couple of weather reports (albeit they were wrong while other hikers who used weather apps on their phones got it right).   2) I had better luck with sending texts via satellite from my iPhone 17. The app would coach me through locating a satellite, and would tell me if I still had signal when I was ready to send my text. This is something the InReach Mini 2 did not do. My two fellow hikers also had good results with satellite messaging from their iPhones.  In summary, I thought my purchase of the InReach Mini 2 and its service was a waste. I would have appreciated something on the InReach Mini 2 telling me if I had a satellite connection or not when I was getting ready to send a message.

Sometimes it takes me minutes to send a message.  Sometimes it’ll take hours.

Acquiring GPS satellites is the problem.  My phone always acquires GPS satellites in a minute or two.

I had numerous instances on a recent trip where my first gen mini would always give me the “Poor GPS Strength” even on a bluebird afternoon with the antennae pointed into a wide swath of sky.  Is this a failing mini or something else you think?