Getting into backcountry skiing, I had mostly borrowed beacons for my first couple years. I was lucky enough to both have volunteered for a non-profit that let me borrow a Tracker 2 when needed, and I worked for a gear shop where I could take out our PEIPS DPS Sport rental beacons when I wanted. (Yes, the lock mechanism on the PEIPS beacons failed eventually, and we ended up replacing our entire fleet with Tracker 2 beacons.) I liked them both, but by the time I decided to bite the bullet and get my own, I knew which features I wanted to look for. The main things I was looking for were battery life, and search range. The Barryvox took the cake, and I haven't looked back for a second.
KEY PERFORMANCE FEATURES:
70m search strip - one of the biggest I could find, and it does perform above other beacons when practicing rescues.
300 hour battery life in send mode - also one of the longest I could find.
Flagging feature - lets you flag multiple burials. This way once you find someone and move on to the next victim, the burial you have found won't interfere with your search for the other burial.
Auto-revert after 4 minutes - if your beacon has been on search for 4 minutes, and the beacon detects that you aren't moving, it will assume you have been buried by a second avalanche and revert back to send mode. This could save a life.
I used my beacon while taking my AIARE 2 course early 2020, and found that while we were playing around with it, both my beacon had the best search strip and accuracy when practicing burials. My friend's PEIPS Micro BT also had great accuracy, which was good to see considering it generally has a lower listed search strip.
Overall, ease of use, accuracy, and battery life gives this beacon a big A+ in my book. Mammut also makes a beacon called the Barryvox S, which is essentially the "guide" version of the Barryvox. It has an analog search strip of 100m
Pros:
Long battery life
Big search strip
Easy to use
Pretty accurate
Cons:
The profile is a little bulky, and hard to fit into a pants pocket