SPOT Tracking For 2009 Senior Contest at Seminole Lakes, Florida

On Mar 8, 10:38*am, MarkHawke7 wrote:
Today is the first contest day for the 2009 Senior Contest at Seminole
Lakes Gliderport in Florida. *There are 55 participants and 4 guests
on the contestants list. *Of those, we currently have 12 of the
participants who have SPOT Personal Trackers and are being tracked.
There may be more that will be added soon. *You can view the tracking
map at:http://www.soaringpilot.org/snspotmap.htm

Please note, this is still a capability in development but it has
worked reasonable well for the past 4 days or so as the early arrivals
flew each day. *I have requests for a similar capability for Perry and
the GTA Race series. *I will be putting those together in the next few
days.

-Mark (OA)

Oh geez. Great Mark. Just great. Another excuse to decrease my
daytime productivity.

Good fun. Thanks for doing this.

P3

On Mar 9, 4:37*pm, Papa3 wrote:
On Mar 8, 10:38*am, MarkHawke7 wrote:

Today is the first contest day for the 2009 Senior Contest at Seminole
Lakes Gliderport in Florida. *There are 55 participants and 4 guests
on the contestants list. *Of those, we currently have 12 of the
participants who have SPOT Personal Trackers and are being tracked.
There may be more that will be added soon. *You can view the tracking
map at:http://www.soaringpilot.org/snspotmap.htm

Please note, this is still a capability in development but it has
worked reasonable well for the past 4 days or so as the early arrivals
flew each day. *I have requests for a similar capability for Perry and
the GTA Race series. *I will be putting those together in the next few
days.

-Mark (OA)

Oh geez. *Great Mark. *Just great. * Another excuse to decrease my
daytime productivity.

Good fun. *Thanks for doing this.

P3

Okay, so assuming that the site is working more-or-less correctly,
then it appears that the reliability of the SPOT fixes is a bit
suspect, no? Out of the dozen or so pilots flying with SPOT, it
seems as if about half of them were not transmitting for fairly long
periods of time or "dropped off" entirely. Maybe I'm missing the
details of how SPOT works, but I thought it was supposed to be "fire
and forget" - turn it on and it broadcasts your position at defined
intervals. Of course, it could just be that my ignorance is
showing...

P3

Everything you wanted to know about SPOT, and a little mo

http://www.wingrigger.com/wingrigger5_005.htm

On Mar 9, 6:08*pm, Tuno wrote:
Everything you wanted to know about SPOT, and a little mo

http://www.wingrigger.com/wingrigger5_005.htm

Okay, so it turns out that I was pretty much right (rare, but it does
happen) about how SPOT is supposed to work. A quick run through a
fiew of the shared pages of the individual users shows that, while
many of their logs have fairly consistent 10-11 minute intervals
between fixes (which seems to be the intended outcome), almost every
one of them has at least one 30 minute gap. A few of them seem to
have gone AWOL entirely during the course of the flight.

Obviously, having some idea of where a pilot was was 30 minutes ago
sure beats having no clue where to begin looking in the event he goes
missing, but I would have thought that the reliability would be
better than this. In other words, if the unit is mounted
approximately in the right place, I would expect it would deliver a
fix pretty consistently.

I'm not in the least suggesting that it's not a valuable tool (for
safety or for amusement purposes), just curious why so many of the
pilots seemed to be getting less than optimal results.

I'm sure I'm missing something.

P3

As TUNO's awesome analysis document shows, the ability of the device
to transmit is very much dependent on placement and view of the sky
and with the current satellites in view. High up on the shoulder
straps, or even placement elsewhere in the cockpit with a good view
seems best. Down low on your shoulder straps or in the side pocket is
not such a good place. Yesterday and the day before, the posits
seemed to be pretty consistent across the board. Today, a bit
spottier. It is what it is. It's still fun to watch though. :-)

-Mark
Okay, so assuming that the site is working more-or-less correctly,
then it appears that the reliability of the SPOT fixes is a bit
suspect, no? * Out of the dozen or so pilots flying with SPOT, it
seems as if about half of them were not transmitting for fairly long
periods of time or "dropped off" entirely. * Maybe I'm missing the
details of how SPOT works, but I thought it was supposed to be "fire
and forget" - turn it on and it broadcasts your position at defined
intervals. * Of course, it could just be that my ignorance is
showing...

P3

Correction, Mark: the SPOT analysis is Steve Koerner's. He's too
modest to point people to it, and it's too good of an analysis not to
share.

I've been slightly dismayed with the missed reports problem, but I
remain a big fan of SPOT just for its utility in emergency situations
and landouts. Regardless of the whether you have a routine landout or
a serious mishap, the messenger tells your crew exactly where you are
with the "Ok" message, and whether you need more urgent help via the
"911" message. My crew is VERY happy that I fly with one, and she
watches my shared SPOT page when I fly.

2NO

I'd say the phrase "Location, Location, Location" certainly applies
here. If you stick it somewhere that it can't see the sky, then it's
not going to be able to transmit the position. If it can, it does.
So if you happen to be stuck low trying to dig your way out (regular
for me), it's very possible that even with the best location for a
horizontal glider, that it not be as good a position for a 45 degree+
glider. :-)

As TUNO said though, if I do land out, makes it VERY easy to let
people know where I am and if I'm ok or, god forbid, NOT!!

Later!

-Mark
On Mar 9, 4:32*pm, Tuno wrote:
Correction, Mark: the SPOT analysis is Steve Koerner's. He's too
modest to point people to it, and it's too good of an analysis not to
share.

I've been slightly dismayed with the missed reports problem, but I
remain a big fan of SPOT just for its utility in emergency situations
and landouts. Regardless of the whether you have a routine landout or
a serious mishap, the messenger tells your crew exactly where you are
with the "Ok" message, and whether you need more urgent help via the
"911" message. My crew is VERY happy that I fly with one, and she
watches my shared SPOT page when I fly.

2NO

On Mar 9, 6:49*pm, MarkHawke7 wrote:
I'd say the phrase "Location, Location, Location" certainly applies
here. *If you stick it somewhere that it can't see the sky, then it's
not going to be able to transmit the position. *If it can, it does.
So if you happen to be stuck low trying to dig your way out (regular
for me), it's very possible that even with the best location for a
horizontal glider, that it not be as good a position for a 45 degree+
glider. *:-)

As TUNO said though, if I do land out, makes it VERY easy to let
people know where I am and if I'm ok or, god forbid, NOT!!

Later!

-Mark
On Mar 9, 4:32*pm, Tuno wrote:



Correction, Mark: the SPOT analysis is Steve Koerner's. He's too
modest to point people to it, and it's too good of an analysis not to
share.

I've been slightly dismayed with the missed reports problem, but I
remain a big fan of SPOT just for its utility in emergency situations
and landouts. Regardless of the whether you have a routine landout or
a serious mishap, the messenger tells your crew exactly where you are
with the "Ok" message, and whether you need more urgent help via the
"911" message. My crew is VERY happy that I fly with one, and she
watches my shared SPOT page when I fly.

2NO- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

As an update to the issue of SPOT tracking message performance, I have
been the 'on-site organizer' for SPOT-equipped pilots here at the
Seniors, and I have found that pilots need to be reminded to place
their units where they can see the sky. A typical response to my
question about where the unit was installed was "I just put it in a
side pocket".

Another problem was that new SPOT users weren't familiar with the
somewhat clunky procedure for getting SPOT into 'track' mode, and were
simply hitting the OK button every so often. If you are looking at
the Seniors experience as a measure of anticipated performance for
other contests, you should look at the track history for TA (my
ship). I have my SPOT unit attached to my harness in such a way that
it is almost horizontal when the glider is flying straigth & level,
and it is well above the canopy rails for good sky visiblity. I
believe Mark told me that he was seeing about 90-95% success rate for
tracking messages over several days of flying. As we all become more
familiar with SPOT units and their idiosyncracies, I believe overall
tracking performance will slowly approach the 90-95% level that I have
been getting.

Frank (TA)

One other minor suggestion irregardless of whether we're talking about
the tracking stuff we're doing or if it's just a wife/significant
other/etc watching your normal SPOT shared page. Try to leave the
unit on after you land back at the airfield for 15-30 mins where it
can send another position or two showing that you did make it back
home. That's been a tough one to get people to do as well. Just a
suggestion.

-Mark