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Letter Re: Question on the Utility of Garmin Rino 655t Receivers

Brother Rawles,
I read your blog every night and appreciate what you stand for, and the way you live your life. My question is on the Garmin Rino 655t GPS [1]. My family is large, but we all live somewhat close to one another just outside of Cleveland Ohio. Although this isn’t optimal, the majority of us work as either firemen or policemen, so relocation would be difficult. We are trying to find the perfect radio communication system that our family could use during a SHTF scenario to communicate during a bug out to the compound. I have tried the MURS radios, as well as Midlands GMRS radios and have found them insufficient. During testing in our area, they only were able to transmit around a mile and a half. That being said, we have been looking for alternatives and I ran across these units. Although expensive, they have peer to peer GPS capabilities, allowing us to at least see where each other are. Even if we are too far to transmit, we would be able to find each other during the carnage. My question is whether or not the GPS capabilities on these Garmin units would still work during a grid down scenario? The units have a lot of other bells and whistles that would be of value including preloaded road maps and topographical maps, but if the GPS was incapacitated during a SHTF event,  there are much more affordable alternatives one can purchase to get maps and weather alerts.

Keep doing what your doing. Your work has put me on the path of clarity, and my eyes are now “open”. – Andrew G.

JWR Replies: I’ve been told that GPS accuracy would be unaffected for at least a year, even if there is a total societal collapse in North America–that is, of course IF that societal collapse were not caused by a Carrington Event Scale solar storm! (That would wipe out most satellites.) But if there is a truly global collapse and there are no corrections from the ground control stations on any continent (very unlikely), then the accuracy of the GPS system would start to gradually degrade, within hours.