I can only get away during summer months, and thinking of exploring some isolated forest road boondocking possibilities in Colorado this July. My wife would feel better knowing I'm okay, and some of these places are likely to have no cell coverage. So I've done a bunch of research. Zoleo looks good, but that $4/month while inactive does add up. My search came down to two top candidates for low user fees (lower than Zoleo for my usage pattern of 2-3 months on, 9-10 months off). They are the Somewear Global Hotspot and the BivyStick Blue. Pausing is free with either of these. Bivy's low end plan is $18/month and doesn't even have an activation fee. But I'm leaning toward the Somewear, which is $15/mo and a $25 one-time activation. Although they're almost a toss-up, I like the 'smart routing' feature... Somewear can sense if there's cell signal or wifi and will default to those whenever it can. The Somewear unit is about $70 less than the Bivy. It lacks the 'preset message send' button that the Bivy unit possesses, but Somewear makes up for it by having no character limit on outgoing messages (BivyStick has a 160 character limit). Although, the present messages on the Bivy are free (they are not counted toward the number of actions covered by the fee).
So, for 2 months on & 10 off, the Somewear should cost $30/year to run, versus $36/year for Bivy and $80/year for the Zoleo.
The common type, user-replaceable battery of the Spot Gen4 tempted me greatly, but it sends a weaker signal to a less-advantageous satellite group, and it can't receive messages, nor does it tell the user in any way if outgoing messages were successfully sent!
Garmin... meh, don't get me started. ;)
