On 17 Apr 2009, at 10:13, stormcrow60@xmission.com wrote:

Sorry I cannot help you with any personal recommendations for PLB's, but I am curious as to why satellites no longer monitor aircraft emergency signals. Is this only for private aircraft or commercial aircaft too? Is this not an essential part of air traffic control/ monitoring? Do you know why they have stopped this monitoring? Just curious.

The old ELTs are just that: Old. And, yes, it applies to all aircraft, big and small. They go off accidentally when they should not and tend to not go off in a crash. Plus tracking one down is a royal pain in the neck. All this resulted in search authorities wasting most of their time on goose chases. The new devices are supposed to be more dependable and, more importantly, when they are activate they send a signal containing the owners name and phone number (so searches can first call the owner to see if they answer the phone) and the exact GPS coordinates so searches go straight to the emergency site. That's the condensed version. If you want the whole story see here: http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/regulatory/elt.html Cheers, patrick