I asked my SPOT rep. whether the unit sends altitude data. He first said "Yes. It sends altitude data in messages." - Which I think means a message from person to person. But when I asked whether it can send altitude data with every tracking message, he said he'd check with the technical experts and get back to me. I'll post here when I find-out.

The unit can post to social media sites like Facebook, and it has a built-in digital compass.

I still like the color maps on my Garmin inReach Explorer+ for emergency "hike out" situations. But I only need that when I fly in remote areas in the Western USA. I don't need it when flying over farmland in Minnesota.

Best Regards,

Paul Remde
Cumulus Soaring, Inc.

On Sunday, May 13, 2018 at 12:04:07 AM UTC-5, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Saturday, May 12, 2018 at 7:38:43 PM UTC-7, Steve Koerner wrote:
There is no mention whatsoever about altitude in their advertising or the Spot X manual, so I would say no.

Tom

Yes, no mention of altitude in the crappy little manual that's currently posted; but there is mention of transmitting elevation if a certain box is checked. Unless there's an onboard database of elevations everywhere, I'm thinking that might actually correspond to transmitting altitude in our use case. We'll have to see. I know Globalstar has been quite thoroughly admonished on the need for altitude reporting for aviation tracking use. It would be awful surprising if they blow that again.

That only seems to apply as a setting for messages, and I took that as a likely settings that are intended to let you control wether coordinate and elevation data is included in your messages, especially since they are also the mechanism where you post to social media.

The device would not need to know elevation data, all it needs to to is set a single bit in those messages that tell the SPOT back-end service to include Google Maps elevation data or not... that's where SPOT today gets tracking elevation data. And they today call 'elevation", hopefully if it was reporting altitude they would not confusingly use "elevation" to also mean "altitude".

Somebody should ping SPOT and ask them, but I'm with Tom here (shock :-)) that if this device included altitude data surely they would promote that at the launch. or even if they were adding it in future they would say so since it's a competitive win for inReach today. it may just be that this is a desire of such a small market they just don't care.

It's intersting/amusing how Spot and Garmin are competing here. Both zig zagging into each other's territory. Gamin went small and just announced the inReach mini I assume in large part to compete with the smaller SPOT Gen 3 trackers for things like the hiking/outdoor market. And Spot then launches the larger Spot X with keyboard and two way messaging targeting the messaging capability of inReach. And they have a big ass keyboard which is nice if you want to use that (the inReach menu/navigation/built in message creation is pretty much a PITA), but no bluetooth smart phone pairing which does works great with inReach, I'm guessing to to keep battery life good, and maybe reduce software development/support complexity.