SPOT Tracking For 2009 Senior Contest at Seminole Lakes, Florida

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