You are obviously a person of faith, as you seem quite impervious to facts. Faith is not a good basis for a risk management exercise. The failure rates remain the same for fixed ELT, because the failure modes remain the same, and cannot be designed out.
Leaddie,
No need to be a prick. My aircraft has a portable beacon in the survival kit in addition to the fixed unit.
You would have more luck discussing issues with people in a civilised manner instead of just taking the piss. You do it all the time. You obviously have a wealth of knowledge to share, so why not do so without getting all abusive?
I do not disagree that a portable unit can also be a life saver, nor do I deny that fixed units have their weaknesses, but a G-switch unit also has distinct advantages and I'd be somewhat uncomfortable in a small/medium aircraft (with only a couple of crew) without one.
Training now involves turning the unit on as soon as there is any trouble, and with a cockpit mounted switch that can be activated with one hand that should be easy to do. This would get the SAR ball rolling fairly quickly and also give excellent location information prior to the possible failure of the antenna in an impact.
Here is a fact from NZ's experience.
Antenna failures: 8 occurrences (17%). As far as can be determined occurrences were all whip antennae breaking.
It seems a lot of the problems they are having there with antenna reliability are due to people reworking old 121.5 installations with 406 units rather than doing a proper installation with crash-worthiness in mind.
Edit: Some extra info from NASA
To fix this problem 406 MHz ELTs were developed to work specifically with the Cospas-Sarsat system. These ELTs dramatically reduce the false alert impact on SAR resources, have a higher accident survivability rate, and decrease the time required to reach accident victims by an average of 6 hours.