There has been a few threads about the plus and minuses of SPOT satellite personal tracker. I have been using it for nearly a year now and find it gives our friends and family back
home a chance to follow our travels from their computer.
The SPOT website is OK for viewing trips, but I thought it was worth mentioning that a guy in the States has set up a much more user friendly website for viewing our travels.
You can checkout his website called SPOT Trip Manager at
http://jasonjonas.org/spot/about.jsp. It is a great free website for SPOT users. It allows you to set up separate trips and it also stores your data for ever (not just 30 days).
A couple of us on this
forum have been using Jason's site for the past 6 months and find it gives a better output than
the SPOT site.
The things that we like are:
- all the positions sent in each trip are joined by a line so it is much easier to follow the traveller's trip
- you can set up whether you want to allow the viewers to your site to be able to download a KML file of your trip
- you can password protect each trip
- for each trip STM (SPOT Trip Manager) shows the first position with an S (Start) and when you pass the end date you set up for the trip, it will show your last position as a F (Finish). Whilst you are travelling, your last sent position it shown as a bike rider. Jason is currently adding more icons for the last sent position).
- you can limit the data shown by specifying a start and end date time. This means you can cut out the positions of where you live if you are worried about showing this sensitive data.
Have a look at one of our trips. The link to the trip is
http://jasonjonas.org/spot/tripViewer.do?id=1128 and the password is
forum. BTW, I also use the unlimited tracking option shown on the map as
orange positions (Fire Eagle). The green positions are manually sent positions with a predefined message (We use a message of 'All is OK at our overnight spot'). To do this I send a manual position at the start of each day so viewers can see where we stopped.
The downsides of Jason's site?
- It usually takes up to 15 minutes for SPOT to send data to STM. This is only a problem with you are tracking someone and want to know where they are that minute.
- The longitude is missing one decimal point - it only tracks to 3 decimal points and it should be 4. Jason is aware of this and is trying to get it fixed. This may mean your position is out by 50 metres.
The upside
- a much more user friendly site without losing your old data.
- we haven't had to activate the emergency signal yet!
Laurie