Last Monday I was at a Bible Study class and a nice older lady asked me about
BIVY STICKS and satellite phones. I have a used a satellite phone once or twice, on someone else's dime but what the heck is a BIVY STICK? So I did a bit of research.
In a nutshell a BIVY STICK works similarly as sat phone comms in conjunction with your smart phone. It allows you to,
> Message the folks in your group,
> Track you,
> Creates a series of group vs. individual messages comms, and
> A few other tasks.
ACR is a leader in emergency rescue and most survival rafts on boats/ships have a ACR radio beacon attached to them for obvious reasons.
Then we have good old sat phones which as I wrote earlier have been around for a couple of decades. The sat phone seems to go in and out of popularity. Bottom line, although the BIVY STICK and sat phone have many common characteristics, they are not the same.
If ones goal is to be found, the sat phone or BIVY STICK would both do the job however, the BIVY STICK is a bit cheaper than the sat phone. I can assure you, that every comm on either devise ends up at the NSA facility in Utah.
Me, I am still a ham radio guy and will not be using either for comms in a grid down situation.
