Everyone's experience is different, so take mine with a grain of salt.

Relative to the population of aircraft and pilots, crashes are relatively rare and crashes out in the Tulees where no one hears the crunch are even rarer. I spent part of my flying career in antiques and junky skydiving ships and I buy into some wisdom handed down by one of my older peers - "crash near a telephone." And of the many crashes that I know of and that my peers rode through, the vast majority of guys who kept flying the airplane until the crunching noises stopped, climbed out of the remains and walked for help. Modern engines are stunningly reliable if you take care of them and the quality of your average homebuilt is equal to or better then what Cessna/Piper/Mooney is selling. And our airplanes are a lot more rugged than we usually think. So we install and maintain ELT's because we are mandated to, not because we get any utility out of them. I note that the CAP folks spend lots more hours looking for pot fields than looking for missing airplanes these days. But anyway...

So it sounds like you intend to purchase the minimum ELT to satisfy the regs and carry another device that you believe will be more effective in letting folks know where you are. A reasonable idea with a lot of options. That said, I will offer the suggestion that something like a SPOT, where your track is recorded all of the time will likely get folks to you faster than a manually activated unit. Plus my friends run their SPOT and then go home and pull up their track on their PC, with a map backdrop. They can show their friends and family where they wandered off to. Works for hiking, kayaking, as well as flying. So there is another dimension of utility to the device. Its not just dead weight 99.999% of the time. And if the track logging and the ability to e-mail greetings to your friends have value to you, they wind up being less expensive than a PLB in terms of value. And their built in GPS is as accurate as any other emergency locator.

I don't know how the consumer PLB's are supported by the emergency services folks. I seem to recall, and I may be wrong or have old info, that you have to register them or folks like the US Coast Guard won't respond to their signal. Yes? No?

Best of luck,

Wes
N78PS