SPOT or similar product

[Shutterbug]

I am going to be doing the JMT and for my wife's piece of mind I am thinking of getting a spot. However there are some negative reviews about the spot's Billing Practices. Is a spot worth it or is there something else out there?

I have shared my story in several different threads, but I will share it again. I own both a SPOT and an InReach. I was strong advocate for SPOT until the one time I actually needed it. I was hiking in the Grand Canyon on the Clear Creek Trail. I was already down in the Clear Creek drainage when a member of our party staggered into camp and informed me that his son had collapsed about a mile back and was unconscious and was lying out in the hot sun with no shade. I decided that the wise thing to do was call for help. I activated the SOS on my spot, then I headed back up the tail. I found the young man and got water to him, but the expected helicopter never came. The next day, when we got back to Phantom Ranch, I contacted the folks at SPOT and learned that the SOS was not received.

It is very possible that if I had used an InReach in the same conditions, the result would have been the same except for one thing. With an InReach the user gets a return message acknowledging that the SOS message was received. If I had used the InReach, I would have known that the SOS didn't get out and would have sent it again from a different location.

For me, the ability to have two way communication is worth the extra cost of the InReach. Most of us will never really need the SOS feature, but when we do, we need it to be fail safe.

[Tundracamper]

Note that I do not consider either the SPOT or Delorme to be PLBs. A PLB Is something like this. The approach for sending a signal is different:
https://www.acrartex.com

[iAmKrzys]

In your cited prior post, your comparison between the Etrex tack log and the Spot track log is invalid. The tracking interval on the SPOT was much longer than the interval on the Etrex, making the Etrex a higher resolution log and the SPOT is a lower resolution log. Comparing the two is like comparing picture quality between HD and SD TVs. To make a valid comparison of the tracks, the tracking interval would need to be the same, or at least similar.

I agree that it doesn't make sense to compare all points on Garmin track. The comparison should only be done for points with the same time stamps, however, I don't have tools to remove extra points from my Garmin track. Having said this, for the wayward point that Spot reported my Garmin track had a point with a time stamp that was only 1 second away and they were 0.6 miles apart. I am not claiming that my Garmin showed perfect location but the tracks are consistent with where we walked, and I definitely didn't run half a mile up the slope in 10 minutes in order to run back 10 minutes later.

I have 3 hiking GPS units and eTrex 30 seems the most consistent of the three. I have successfully found hundreds of geocaches using this gps and over long time I came to trust that it is within 30 feet of my true location and have never had a reason to believe that it was more than 100 feet away. I often record tracks with multiple GPSes in order to have extra data for marking trails on OpenStreetMap and eTrex 30 often is most consistent when I walk same trails multiple times. Hence I am going to renew my Spot contract when the time comes.

I guess my Spot Gen 3 accuracy is less of an issue since I don't use it for navigation and most of the time it is actually pretty good, but I wish these problems with erroneous positions were fixed.

I looked at deLorme inReach but it was more expensive in terms of fees for tracking, it felt much bigger in my hand than Spot, and it uses internal proprietary rechargeable batteries, so you just cannot easily bring more of them on your trip like you can with Spot.

Some people complained about customer service but I found that they responded within reasonable time to my e-mails - it's just that they were not really forthcoming when it came to investigating accuracy questions and instead replied with what felt like some generic prepared statements. As to the jitters about the automatic service renewals, you can always pay with one of the limited use credit cards, so that subsequent charge won't succeed w/o your intervention.

[iAmKrzys]

Hence I am going to renew my Spot contract when the time comes.

Oops! I really meant to put this sentence in this paragraph:

I looked at deLorme inReach but it was more expensive in terms of fees for tracking, it felt much bigger in my hand than Spot, and it uses internal proprietary rechargeable batteries, so you just cannot easily bring more of them on your trip like you can with Spot. Hence I am going to renew my Spot contract when the time comes.

[Wyoming]

I have shared my story in several different threads, but I will share it again. I own both a SPOT and an InReach. I was strong advocate for SPOT until the one time I actually needed it. I was hiking in the Grand Canyon on the Clear Creek Trail. I was already down in the Clear Creek drainage when a member of our party staggered into camp and informed me that his son had collapsed about a mile back and was unconscious and was lying out in the hot sun with no shade. I decided that the wise thing to do was call for help. I activated the SOS on my spot, then I headed back up the tail. I found the young man and got water to him, but the expected helicopter never came. The next day, when we got back to Phantom Ranch, I contacted the folks at SPOT and learned that the SOS was not received.

It is very possible that if I had used an InReach in the same conditions, the result would have been the same except for one thing. With an InReach the user gets a return message acknowledging that the SOS message was received. If I had used the InReach, I would have known that the SOS didn't get out and would have sent it again from a different location.

For me, the ability to have two way communication is worth the extra cost of the InReach. Most of us will never really need the SOS feature, but when we do, we need it to be fail safe.

No disrespect but it is very likely you did not activate and trigger the device properly. I use a SPOT Gen3 and am familiar with how it works. If you are cold starting it (that is it was turned off and you had to turn it on) then you need to give it time to find the satellites before using it. I also went to the web site and reviewed how the SOS feature works. Once triggered it lets you know via a flash signal it is working (did you see that?) and then it continues to send the SOS signal every 5 mins until the batteries die (so dozens of times). If it was triggered properly and kept facing the sky and moved a few times to ensure a good signal (this is an emergency so doing all this is the users responsibility) as one would do in a deep canyon then there is almost zero chance it would not have worked. Even if the device cannot get exact geo-coordinates to transmit it still transmits the SOS without them. This failure was likely user error.

I am glad everything turned out ok.

Your story really brings home my constant fight with those who say not to carry lots of water.