I've been playing with "SPOT" a little bit over the past week. It seems to work pretty well most of the time. My biggest criticism is that it does not know when a signal is received by a satellite. For this reason, you really don't know if it worked the way it was supposed to. This week, I triggered an "OK" inside a subway tunnel. SPOT claimed that the transmission was successful. Unlikely. It can't even get a GPS signal inside the tunnel. Perhaps it would have figured out that it can't find any GPS satellite signals eventually, but I only gave it a few minutes. How long does it keep an old GPS location? It appears to keep it for a few minutes anyway. SPOT was unable to find satellites within the city core. The tall skyscrapers were probably blocking the signal. It seems to me that it would be helpful to know where on the horizon that SPOT would find the closest Satellite. If I had gone to the opposite side of the street, perhaps Spot would have found a Satellite to talk to? It seems to me that cliff face or deep river gorge would have similar characteristics to a downtown city street. If you were to have trouble half way down a rock face (rock climbing) you could find yourself in a place with no signal. Thoughts? SPOT seems to perform best when it has a completely clear sky to work with. Messages seem to be delivered to a cell phone in between 1 minutes and 5 minutes. This delay may have more to do with cell phone traffic then SPOT's efficiency. One improvement I'd make to the SPOT web page is the opportunity to add a "float plan" or "trip plan." You could provide a trip plan to you contacts, but if this was available online then it could be provided immediately to rescue teams. Derek --------------------------------------------------------------- Please limit all email attachments sent to this address to a maximum of 0.5MB. All email attachments that are larger then 0.5MB will automatically be deleted. --------------------------------------------------------------- ICQ: 262152266, AIM: GlamourpetsD, MSN: [my email address], Yahoo Messenger: glamourpets --------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Tue Sep 30 2008 - 18:58:27 PDT
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