SPOT Tracking For 2009 Senior Contest at Seminole Lakes, Florida

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

Related to this topic, I've been able to enhance my application so
that it can now output KML quite nicely. I put together a small kml
file that contains network links for showing the SPOT trackers,
current task and the other turnpoints. This file can be opened by
Google Earth for viewing. Google Earth is by far the best depiction
of this information as I'm able to rotate the airplane symbols to show
the general direction of travel of each participant. John Leibacher
has graciously agree to host the kml file to allow for easy access.
The link to it is:

http://soaringweb.org/TP/Seminole/se...acking_map.kml

For those whose computers just aren't quite up to the task of running
Google Earth. The original page is still available at:
http://www.soaringpilot.org/snspotmap.htm

The only thing it doesn't show is the rotated icons.

Enjoy!!

-Mark

Mark - Thanks but....I couldn't get it to work with IE 6 (yeah, I
know). I just get a page showing raw HTML code. It does work with
FireFox 3, Safari 3.2.2 and Chrome 1. FYI and hope you can fix the
issue with IE 6 as there is alot of installed base. My $0.02.

Thanks again.

PS - The direct link imbedded in the XML works fine;
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UT...p; output=kml

- John

Hi Mark,

I'm looking forward to trying it in Google Earth. I just upgraded to the
latest version of Google Earth today, but I can't seem to get the link below
to work. It simply opens a text file in my browser window. I tried saving
the text into a text file with a .kml extension and double-clicking on it.
Google Earth tries to open it, but it gives an error as follows:

Google Earth Error
Open of file seniors.kml failed: Parse error at line 1, column 2: XML or
text declaration not at start of entity.

I imagine I'm doing something wrong. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Paul Remde

"MarkHawke7" wrote in message
...
Related to this topic, I've been able to enhance my application so
that it can now output KML quite nicely. I put together a small kml
file that contains network links for showing the SPOT trackers,
current task and the other turnpoints. This file can be opened by
Google Earth for viewing. Google Earth is by far the best depiction
of this information as I'm able to rotate the airplane symbols to show
the general direction of travel of each participant. John Leibacher
has graciously agree to host the kml file to allow for easy access.
The link to it is:

http://soaringweb.org/TP/Seminole/se...acking_map.kml

For those whose computers just aren't quite up to the task of running
Google Earth. The original page is still available at:
http://www.soaringpilot.org/snspotmap.htm

The only thing it doesn't show is the rotated icons.

Enjoy!!

-Mark