rlown wrote:Longri, did you call SPOT about the message cancellation conundrum?
It's not even my device; it's a rental. And these sorts of problems have been documented elsewhere. It's just that a lot of people say theirs works nearly perfectly. I met one guy who actually uses the different messages (OK, alternate, help, tracking) as bits in a code to increase the number of types of messages he can send. Clever, but only if the messages are reliably received.
The other reason I didn't buy a SPOT was reports that dealing with the company can be really, really frustrating. Hard to get on the phone, difficult to get emails returned. And it's a subscription. They take your money every year and cancelling requires some effort apparently. One suggestion I read of in a couple places was to subscribe for the year and then
call your credit card company and tell them you lost your card so that they give you a new number. WTF?
rlown wrote:Has anyone on this forum ever pushed the SOS button on either device??
From what I've read this is another issue with SPOT. While it works, the reliability is lower (how much?) than with a proper PLB due to the technology/satellites involved. I don't claim to understand the details, but I knew that carrying a SPOT that drops messages and has 1-5 hour gaps in tracking might also fail to signal an SOS in some types of terrain.
At one point in my walk I got kind of disoriented traversing in a forest. Busted up terrain, huge downed logs, steep, loose dirty gullies, that sort of thing. The kind of place where you could easily twist an ankle or worse. I thought -- nobody will find me here and probably my SPOT isn't even visible to the GPS satellites. Sure enough, when I got home there was a large gap in tracking coverage there, not too surprising. But what did surprise me were the even larger gaps in areas where I though sky visibility was pretty good.
Another thing. I really thought being able to message and have tracking would provide peace of mind and possibly the rare safety aspect of known location if I were incapacitated and unable to hit the SOS button. But it had a weird side effect. I felt like someone unseen was watching me. I found I hated that feeling and wondered if it might influence my choices. I'd rather be unseen, I think. The funny part is, when I got home it turned out my wife lost the URL to the tracking page. And that she only got a fraction of the email messages I thought I was sending. I
was mostly unseen!