Spent some time on the phone with the SPOT help desk last week trying to get up to speed on their new mapping capabilities. It took some time as 1) I'm not very technical and 2) it required a cord to connect the SPOT Gen3 to my computer to make an update. Garmin marks their cords with the word "Garmin." GoPro marks their cords with the word "GoPro." SPOT does not mark their cords so I had to go through a box of cords, maybe 20 or more, until I could find one that worked. I did find one that worked. After the update I tried it out on my last sail, above.
There are some things I really like about the enhanced mapping.
- They got rid of that "boot" mark, I never liked that. (Appearances are everything.)
- When I first used a SPOT device the locations were marked every 20 minutes. Now that can be customized to as little as every five minutes. I've set mine at five minutes.
- The tracks are displayed with a much higher quality satellite image.
- SPOT stores the tracking marks for three years. I like the idea of looking back over three years and seeing tracks from multiple trips.
- I can set up a shared page for each trip with a beginning and ending date, the entire trip can be view with a url on a single page (in the past I think the tracks were limited to maybe 50 locations so a week or two long trip would have to be viewed over multiple pages.)
So the SPOT is ready to go. I need to check in with Garmin to see if they have resolved the gps issues that I (and I've read a lot of other people) experienced last fall.
Time to start checking the gear, sorting the food. I don't know when or where I will go but want to be ready.
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