"Roger Long" wrote in
:

I'm pretty impressed with the SPOT beacon battery life. It's still
running on the first set of two AA Lithium's I put in when I bought it
back in May. This includes:

All the testing and playing after purchase.
Running it for nearly every daysail, 4 - 6 a week. This was great
because I was often alone and people didn't have to bug me on the cell
phone to find out if I was headed in for dinner.
8 - 12 hours a day on our 9 day cruise downeast.
10 - 14 hours a day on the recent 8 day Rachel Carson delivery.

I'm wondering just how much life is left after a summer of fairly
heavy use so I've set up a new page and started it running on the
window sill. You can watch it die he

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/gogl.jsp?glId=
0VC8x0r9JUgIniche7ZeYW
Ua0SLl40PnT

This is starting at 3:30 on election day. It may be a little while
before fixes show up.


Is this what they are?!
http://www.batterybank.net/digital/master/aalith.html

1.5V 2.9Ah...very dense, non-rechargeable and a 10 year shelf life easy.
4-pack is less than $8 from there.

Why is everyone giving Spot so much money for them?? That's crazy!

By the way, these are GREAT walkie talkie batteries for marine walkies,
too! With a 10 year shelf life and such a high Ah rating, you get both
great storage life for standby walkies and great runtime when you pull
them off the shelf after sitting for a few years.

Do NOT confuse these true Lithium-Iron Disulphide batteries with cheap
crap batteries with the word Lithium on them at your local electronic
store. Anyone can use Lithium as a trade name, and do. There are lines
of plain Alkaline batteries with "Lithium" on the label....which, I
think, needs to be prosecuted.

"This Lithium AA battery is disposable and is for one time use only (Not
Rechargable) . It is a disposable Lithium Iron Disulphide chemistry
which should not be confused with rechargeable Lithium-Ion technology.
There is no such thing as a rechargeable AA Li-ion battery available in
the marketplace."

The reason for this last statement is that Li-Ion and Li-Polymer
batteries each have a built-in charge state IC that makes sure they are
not discharged past 50%, which destroys them, and makes sure they are
not overcharged, which causes them to explode....like Sony laptop
batteries do. Li-Ion batteries all have THREE contacts. The IC has its
own output to the device charging circuit to shut down the charge when
full and make the device indicate the full charge somehow.