When All Else Fails – The Garmin InReach Mini 2 – Part 11 – More About Power Consumption

In part 6, I’ve taken a look at how much power my Garmin InReach draws in various scenarios. Depending on where the device was located and used throughout the days, the battery would last me anywhere between 16 days in the best case and only a single day in case no satellite can be reached all day long. On a recent skiing trip , I now had a look how long the battery would last it tracking, i.e. location recording was enabled in addition to sending and receiving the occasional message over the Iridium network.

In the default configuration, the tracking feature activates the GPS receiver of the device and stores one position a minute. In this scenario, in combination with a good part of the sky visible and sending and receiving messages over the Iridium network occasionally during a 5-6 our test period, the battery indicator decreased by 4%. The tracking granularity can also be increased to an interval of about 10 seconds. In this configuration the battery decreased by 8% in the 5 hour test period. So it’s indeed a bit more, but not much. Also interesting: One one day I didn’t activate tracking and just sent the occasional message with the sky visible most of the time and even then, the device consumed about 1% of the battery capacity per hour. That’s quite a bit more than what I’ve measured in part 6 and I’m not actually quite sure why. But still, compared to the amount of power my smartphone required during that time (while doing many other things than just tracking my path with Osmand), it’s not very much.