New Toy
It’s not really a toy. It’s more of a device – for safety.
Remember the dude that cut his own arm off or the countless climbers dying of hypothermia in snow caves on Mt. Hood?
Something like this may have saved them.
It’s a GPS/Satellite messenger. Basically it sends messages with GPS locations via satellite. You can send simple “Hey we’re cool.” messages or S.O.S/911 messages with your GPS location.
I got one for the various adventures I like to take throughout the year – the winter ones in particular. When you’re six miles back into the Adirondack High Peak wilderness in winter, there’s no one to hear you scream.
I’d contemplated this particular device for a while. There are much better/more accurate devices, but $600 was a little steep. The Spot is only around $150 for the unit, then $99 a year for the service. Yeah, over a few years I will have spent $600, but the more expensive devices don’t offer the friendly “Hey we’re cool” messages that can really set friends and family at ease when they haven’t heard from you in a few days.
The reviews of the Spot were very mixed – leaning mostly toward negative, but as I’ve come to learn about reviews and more specifically the reviewers, people are stupid. Yeah, it’s got some idiosyncrasies, but I’ve been playing/testing it enough before the big trips to think I know what to expect when I do use it.
Here are some of the results so far:
http://www.findmespot.com/mylocation/?id=45p3U/41.32427/\-77.32608
http://www.findmespot.com/mylocation/?id=44ziK/40.06545/\-75.729 (if you zoom in, you’ll see that we were on the lake – it can be that accurate)
These messages/links are sent to the email addresses of a specific group I set up before-hand. Jen is obviously a recipient.
Another way to see where I am or what I’m doing is checking out the public page I’ve set up here. There is one limitation of the public page. It will only show locations for the last 7 days. Considering I haven’t used my Spot in the last 7 days, you won’t see anything. If you check it next weekend while I’m in New Hampshire, you should see some locations/messages popup.
One other consideration/idiosyncrasy is it doesn’t work so well when you’re moving. It works, but the location isn’t necessarily accurate. This is fine if it’s an emergency, because typically you’re not moving too much in an emergency. On a trip like next weekend we’ll be moving constantly. We’ll be climbing Mt. Washington and there isn’t a whole lot of time to sit and wait for your Spot to send it’s message (a 20 minute process). When we reach our turn-around (not necessarily the summit depending on conditions), I plan to send a message, though the message may not exactly reflect our position. Oh well. It will be close.
So we’ll see. Next month when I take a bunch of people to the Adirondacks, it should be a lot more interesting. There will be a lot more messages/locations. Hopefully none of them emergencies.
– b