I've been a long-time user of the SPOT GPS Personal Tracking service and gladly pay about $175 per year for their premium services. Not only the bread and butter of my rally blog reporting, but also an indispensable tool to keep friends and family in the loop as I ride my motorcycle down the slabs and twist byways of our continent.
Combine that pay service with my friend, Jason Jonas', free SPOTWalla and you have a one-two punch of integrated location service that just rocks. So much so that I feel compelled to donate to Jason's motorcycle-community efforts from time to time.
This is SPOT:
This is SPOT on SpotWalla:
<br data-mce-bogus="1">
Any Questions?
Sometimes people confuse SPOT with SpotWalla and the best analogy I have is the actual orange SPOT device is like buying a Ford Mustang off the dealer lot. Signing up for SpotWalla is like taking it to Shelby and them tuning it into twice the car you started with...except for free or a small donation. I simply couldn't imagine running SPOT without SpotWalla.
Interestingly, last weekend I found myself without my SPOT Tracker because I loaned it to a my Japanese kayaker friend, Ryota.
Figuring I'd need to borrow somebody else's....I did a little homework and found that SpotWalla can *technically* receive GPS position reports from a variety of products more than just SPOT. Several are pale imitations of SPOT in my opinion and cost similar amounts, but the one that piqued my interest was "Google Latitude".
Coincidentally, I had already installed this as a free app on my iPhone and didn't give it much thought after trying it out. It seemed locked into it's own interface that only other people on iPhones with the same app might be able to see each other. It's kinda a half-ass social networking attempt to see a picture of yourself at one Starbucks and see if anybody else is at the other Starbucks down the street.
However, if Jason had figured out a way to intercept that message and integrate it into his own ubercool breadcrumb map via Google Maps...it could rival a SPOT Tracker and not cost me anything more.
After about 20 minutes of futzing around between my iPhone, SpotWalla, and Google Latitude I finally found the correct web page and settings to get the two to talk together. Jason's a software engineer and his explanations are terse, but understandable to a fellow software engineer. Once I found the right part of the process it all made sense and suddenly my iPhone was feeding into my SpotWalla page.
The number 1 proviso that everybody should remember is that using an iPhone for GPS location is cell phone based. That means your position is only going to be reported IF you are in range of a cell phone tower..and even then it's not quite as optimal as one might hope.
SPOT, by contrast, is satellite based and reports your position directly to satellites (yep...you're beaming a signal from the little orange thing to about 30 satellites 12,600 miles above us) and needs no cell phone connection to work. If your SPOT unit can see the sky...it will report it's position 99%+ of the time.
And, if you're in the middle of nowhere....that's really one of the big values of SPOT. Your friends and family know where you're at in the wilderness...every 10 minutes like clockwork. Plus, you can also press a little "911" button of things go bad...and blue lights and choppers should be flying in within an hour or two.
2012 Cal 24 with iPhone, Latitude, and SPOTWalla
This map shows green "OK" messages. SPOT (go back to the 2011 map) uses orange ones to show breadcrumbs from "SPOTCasting" and when you actively press the "OK"--you get a green one. I tell my watchers that a green one on SPOT is intended to show that I've just got a bonus, did something interesting, or thinking about somebody particular back home (e.g. my girlfriend).
2012 shows a big skip between Gerlach and Cedarville, CA...and that's because there are no cell phones for about 75 miles. That hour period at the beginning of the rally was probably hard for watchers because nothing appeared to happen. People watching a rally live--really thrive off that update every 10 minutes. I know I do when I'm watching others.....you can divine many things off those positions including pace, slow, fast, if they're stopping, etc.
There's also another skip as I was in the deepest darkest forest of Northern California....probably 2 hours of no reports that had to be hard for watchers....because I know it was hard on my to ride 60 miles of one lane mountain highway.
I also didn't know exactly how Latitude worked and wasn't 100% sure it automatically was reporting position when I came back into range of a cell phone tower. I found myself manually trying to find my position and frustrated it wouldn't as cell phone coverage would shift from "E" for an older level of AT&T service that I think was sort of what "2G" was before they started calling the new one 3G. Urban areas were great and I'd get lots of response from 3G. I'd later find out that about 1/2 of the reports were me manually reporting and the other half were Latitude automatically checking in. That bodes well for people that want to use this service is as their primary.
It turns out Ryota is giving my SPOT unit back...so I'll be sticking with the Cadillac at least this season. For the $175 it's peace-of-mind for me. For somebody thinking about getting into tracking who already has an iPhone or Droid...it's a good option if you want to live with the limitations and do a little homework.
Combine that pay service with my friend, Jason Jonas', free SPOTWalla and you have a one-two punch of integrated location service that just rocks. So much so that I feel compelled to donate to Jason's motorcycle-community efforts from time to time.
This is SPOT:
This is SPOT on SpotWalla:
<br data-mce-bogus="1">Any Questions?
Sometimes people confuse SPOT with SpotWalla and the best analogy I have is the actual orange SPOT device is like buying a Ford Mustang off the dealer lot. Signing up for SpotWalla is like taking it to Shelby and them tuning it into twice the car you started with...except for free or a small donation. I simply couldn't imagine running SPOT without SpotWalla.
Interestingly, last weekend I found myself without my SPOT Tracker because I loaned it to a my Japanese kayaker friend, Ryota.
Figuring I'd need to borrow somebody else's....I did a little homework and found that SpotWalla can *technically* receive GPS position reports from a variety of products more than just SPOT. Several are pale imitations of SPOT in my opinion and cost similar amounts, but the one that piqued my interest was "Google Latitude".
Coincidentally, I had already installed this as a free app on my iPhone and didn't give it much thought after trying it out. It seemed locked into it's own interface that only other people on iPhones with the same app might be able to see each other. It's kinda a half-ass social networking attempt to see a picture of yourself at one Starbucks and see if anybody else is at the other Starbucks down the street.
However, if Jason had figured out a way to intercept that message and integrate it into his own ubercool breadcrumb map via Google Maps...it could rival a SPOT Tracker and not cost me anything more.
After about 20 minutes of futzing around between my iPhone, SpotWalla, and Google Latitude I finally found the correct web page and settings to get the two to talk together. Jason's a software engineer and his explanations are terse, but understandable to a fellow software engineer. Once I found the right part of the process it all made sense and suddenly my iPhone was feeding into my SpotWalla page.
The number 1 proviso that everybody should remember is that using an iPhone for GPS location is cell phone based. That means your position is only going to be reported IF you are in range of a cell phone tower..and even then it's not quite as optimal as one might hope.
SPOT, by contrast, is satellite based and reports your position directly to satellites (yep...you're beaming a signal from the little orange thing to about 30 satellites 12,600 miles above us) and needs no cell phone connection to work. If your SPOT unit can see the sky...it will report it's position 99%+ of the time.
And, if you're in the middle of nowhere....that's really one of the big values of SPOT. Your friends and family know where you're at in the wilderness...every 10 minutes like clockwork. Plus, you can also press a little "911" button of things go bad...and blue lights and choppers should be flying in within an hour or two.
2012 Cal 24 with iPhone, Latitude, and SPOTWallaThis map shows green "OK" messages. SPOT (go back to the 2011 map) uses orange ones to show breadcrumbs from "SPOTCasting" and when you actively press the "OK"--you get a green one. I tell my watchers that a green one on SPOT is intended to show that I've just got a bonus, did something interesting, or thinking about somebody particular back home (e.g. my girlfriend).
2012 shows a big skip between Gerlach and Cedarville, CA...and that's because there are no cell phones for about 75 miles. That hour period at the beginning of the rally was probably hard for watchers because nothing appeared to happen. People watching a rally live--really thrive off that update every 10 minutes. I know I do when I'm watching others.....you can divine many things off those positions including pace, slow, fast, if they're stopping, etc.
There's also another skip as I was in the deepest darkest forest of Northern California....probably 2 hours of no reports that had to be hard for watchers....because I know it was hard on my to ride 60 miles of one lane mountain highway.
I also didn't know exactly how Latitude worked and wasn't 100% sure it automatically was reporting position when I came back into range of a cell phone tower. I found myself manually trying to find my position and frustrated it wouldn't as cell phone coverage would shift from "E" for an older level of AT&T service that I think was sort of what "2G" was before they started calling the new one 3G. Urban areas were great and I'd get lots of response from 3G. I'd later find out that about 1/2 of the reports were me manually reporting and the other half were Latitude automatically checking in. That bodes well for people that want to use this service is as their primary.
It turns out Ryota is giving my SPOT unit back...so I'll be sticking with the Cadillac at least this season. For the $175 it's peace-of-mind for me. For somebody thinking about getting into tracking who already has an iPhone or Droid...it's a good option if you want to live with the limitations and do a little homework.
Last edited by a moderator:
