Meili was the brainchild of Stu Wells and Simon Purves, both directors of Location Extreme:

“We both love the outdoors, be it the serenity of dawn camping out alone in the Highlands of Scotland, or the rush of skiing fresh powder in the Alps, or the awe inspiring majesty you feel when kayaking on a Norweigan Fjord. Meili was born of the need we felt for a simple rugged tracker that would stay on for the whole trip, especially in cold conditions, would keep us connected with our team or our loved ones, and would provide a simple SOS function so we could be located if we got into difficulties. And we wanted the solution to be accessible to everyone who needed it."

We initially began by designing an app that would allow groups to stay connected outdoors by seeing where each other’s phones were, but we soon realised that mobile signal was patchy in the places we wanted to use the app and that GPS functions on phones degraded the battery too quickly, especially in cold conditions reducing effectiveness to less than a day.

No-one wants GPS to have flattened the phone battery leaving you with no comms at all.

We decided that the phone should be viewed (in the outdoors) as a comms device, not relied on as a location tracker.

We needed something more robust, and less expensive! Something we could distribute to a team of explorers and see where they all are on the app.

We tested a myriad of tracking solutions but couldn’t find one with sufficent ruggedness or battery life. Some would run on AA batteries (!) others would have questionable firmware and hardware.

So, in short, we came to the conclusion that we would need to design our own solution.

And so Meili was born, named after the Meili, son of Odin, known as the Mile Stepper, the Norse god of travellers.