Soaring with SPOT

Neat email hack Tom. My personal interest is really about the tracking
feature and I'm unlikely to want to also send messages, except for a
911 message, but I'll see as I play more.

If people are interested I posted some stuff on SPOT on my blog at
http://www.darrylramm.com/2008/01/03...lite-messenger. Nothing
any deeper than already talked about on r.a.s., except you can see
life size screen shots of the web UI that SPOT provides for showing
tracked points on maps.

One thing that amused me from a few days ago and is shown on the maps
on my blog, is after a very short flight when I'd turned the SPOT
messenger on just to see if it worked but forgot to turn it off again
and drove home with it on the passenger seat of my SUV. It seemed to
work fairly well just sitting on the seat receiving GPS signals and
transmitting back via the Globalstar satellites, presumably through
the closed sunroof. No deep meaning there, just a throw away
observation that I would not have expected it to do as well as it did.

Jim, enjoy Australia and playing in the Nimbus.

Darryl


On Dec 30 2007, 11:54 pm, JS wrote:
If you didn't know before, you now know that Tom works with computers.

I have not (yet?) subscribed to "spotcasting" for the reason Tom is
powering off and on. Didn't find the text sent to the phone to be as
unusable as an intermittent cell phone conversation, but in my test
neither the text nor the e-mail had the name of the nearest place.
In my messages I've tried to improve on what's sent, for example an OK
from the front yard:

JS SPOT checking in OK. If you receive this multiple times from the
same location, I've landed.
Unit Number: 0-7356844
Latitude: 35.1515
Longitude: -118.5107
Nearest Town from unit Location: Unknown
Distance to the nearest town: Unknown
Time in GMT the message was sent: 12/28/2007 18:56:07http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=35.1515,-118.5107&ie...

Since there's no altitude info, I added the multiple message bit.
The HELP message is similar:

JS SPOT HELP message. Will try to contact by phone. If followed by an
OK then another HELP, please send help ASAP.

Did the HELP/OK/HELP for emergency (not worthy of Search and Rescue)
use, as we don't yet know if multiple outgoing messages are possible
from one press of a message button or if a button will stick.

Taking the device to Australia for some flying in a few days.
Also trying a mount to the parachute shoulder strap to see if it's
useful. My near-obsolete P-ELT's battery is more than 2 years overdue
anyway, so the location is available.
Jim