Notice that for the actual purpose of rescue only what they're calling "Gen2" actually works. The earlier devices which make up most of the linked examples are pretty, and would doubtless make interesting jewellery for a man at a society dinner or in the boardroom, but they do almost nothing if you're alone somewhere and need rescuing today.

Once upon a time, decades ago, a "beacon" is just a primitive radio transmitter which when activated produces a clearly man-made signal (it sounds like a siren basically if you're listening to it). This works pretty good if people nearby know to look for it. Then COSPAS SARSAT is a "peaceful use" satellite technology, put some satellites up above the Earth, they relay the chosen emergency frequencies and now a human operator can "hear" that beacon from hundreds of miles away. So that's all the original Emergency does. Rescue this way was sometimes a long-shot, but you did not have better options.

But obviously now we can do a lot better, so eventually COSPAS SARSAT deprecated and then eventually eliminated that relay technology in favour of 406 MHz digital beacons. So now it can tell which beacon has been triggered, and you can add stuff like contact details to a database for the rescuers. This way when they get a beacon they can see the signal is Steve Smith, solo mountaineer, here's a contact number for Steve's mum, so before we commit a mountain rescue team to 18 hours of work we can verify whether Steve is currently up a mountain [maybe in urgent need of rescue] or whether he lost that beacon last month and is at home now watching Netflix.

Your point is well taken - I just wanted to be absolutely clear for anybody who might get one of these that the original Emergency is now basically just pretty and only a modern "Gen2" Emergency "works" for its stated purpose.