On Oct 2, 10:53*am, Morgan Hall wrote:
Hi Frank,

My experience so far had been that the tracking intervals was fixed at
10 minutes. They did seem to have custom options that would allow
finer grained tracking updates, but I don't think they have been
implemented yet.

As a standalone device it is very comparable to spot devices. The two
way messaging when paired with an android device has huge potential,
but admittedly goes beyond our needs for xc tracking.

We will just have to see what changes and features they launch the
final version with. They have been pretty responsive to input so far,
but I know that they need to draw a line and release it. So we will
likely see more and more features opened up since they have built
themselves a platform that will expand pretty easily.

Pricing is going to be an interesting factor in adoption i think.
Market it at a comparable price to spot, you will probably get some
people to jump over because of the altitude, heading and velocity
info. At the current price point, I don't think they will have as much
luck.

Morgan

Morgan,

Yes, I agree - at the present price point, with 10 minute minimum
interval, they are probably not competitive in the XC tracking market
(gliders, hang-gliders, parasails, etc).

IMHO there are two main drivers for satellite trackers in XC
competitions. The first and most important is the safety aspect -
satellite trackers provide (almost) global coverage and work when all
other communications links are unavailable. I have personally
experienced a SPOT-only retrieve (2010 in Texas) where my cellphone
didn't work and I couldn't contact a towplane, but my SPOT "Help"
signal got through to my crew. Since then we have seen other similar
occurrences. AFAIK, we haven't yet seen a SPOT "save" in XC soaring,
but it is sure to happen. The second driver is for near-real-time
display of glider positions on contest tasks, and SPOT 'sort of' works
for this, and it is a heck of a lot better than anything we have had
before SPOT and HawkeTracking (full disclosu I am co-owner of
Hawke Tracking along with Mark Hawkins, and I foolishly spent all my
profits from the last three years on a hamburger at McDonalds). The
lack of more rapid updates, the lack of GPS altitude reporting, and
some gratuitous data delays thrown in by the SPOT folks have hurt the
display aspect significantly, but have not hindered or degraded the
safety/outlanding notification performance at all.

Bottom line on all this: SPOT wins over InReach until/unless InReach
offers more rapid updates and/or more timely access to position/
altitude data. Even then, all SPOT would have to do is open up the
pipe for GPS altitude and lower the minimum interval and they would be
right back on top. If InReach were to gain some market traction in
the XC community (gliders, hang-gliders, motorcycling, parasailers),
it probably would not take much to integrate InReach data into current
HawkeTracking maps (I'm speaking out of school here - Mark is the
expert).

Frank (TA)