Hellman wrote:
While your theory about my track being fairly constant and possibly
aligned badly with the satellites is a possibility, I've never had
that problem before and whenever I fly from Hayward to the Tahoe area
I fly a roughly similar track. There's almost never any lift on that
part of the flight, so I fly pretty much direct.

Since no one else mentioned a big gap that day, I'm assuming the
problem was unique to me.

Have you contacted the SPOT people about this? If there was a system
problem, they should know about it and be able to tell you if it caused
your track point losses. Possibly, some SPOTs might have problems, and
maybe they can determine if yours is one of them from what you report.
In about 75 flights with my SPOT, neither I nor my wife have noticed
more than two consecutive missing points.

One thing that came out of this: I've told
my wife not to look at the SPOT track to watch my progress. A huge gap
like that looks too much like a ship gone down.

This is an interesting point. My wife likes the track reports so much, I
don't want to tell her that, but maybe she and I should decide
explicitly how many missed points are needed before starting to worry,
or initiating a search.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* Sections on Mode S, TPAS, ADS-B, Flarm, more

* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org