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SPOT battery life
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/g...eYWUa0SLl40PnT This is starting at 3:30 on election day. It may be a little while before fixes show up. -- Roger Long |
SPOT battery life
On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:44:30 -0500, "Roger Long"
wrote: 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/g...eYWUa0SLl40PnT This is starting at 3:30 on election day. It may be a little while before fixes show up. That sounds like pretty good battery life, especially considering that it is transmitting as well as receiving. Does the SPOT device also double as a useful GPS, and is it waterproof enough to take on a dinghy, leave on the flybridge, etc. ? |
SPOT battery life
"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. |
SPOT battery life
"Roger Long" wrote in
: http://share.findmespot.com/shared/g...JUgIniche7ZeYW Ua0SLl40PnT Redirected me to a new shared page: http://share.findmespot.com/shared/f...pots.jsp?glId= 0VC8x0r9JUgIniche7ZeYWUa0SLl40PnT and then that page shows no input at all at 1648EST 11/4/08 You may not have gotten access to a bird from the windowsill with the house shielding it from all but the one direction...missing the target birds. The signal level at even the edge of the atmosphere where Spots birds fly is simply just above the background noise level at the receiver. During the day, you'll notice if there are any obstructions like you have it now, the attenuation of the obstruction causes the noise from the sun, the biggest broadband transmitter in these parts, to be stronger than what's left of the Spot's little peanut whistle transmitter....and the bird only picks it up at night when the Earth shades the sun's racket from the birds. Just think back to how big those old satellite dishes were from geostationary orbit 32,800 miles over the equator. You had to have THAT big a capture area, just to have enough signal pointed at the little feedhorn to overcome the heat noise of the receiver inside the horn. Oh, how times have changed....(c; Imagine how tiny and buried in the noise the signal from Voyager 1 and 2 is out in the Oort Cloud. The signal comes from a Traveling Wave Tube that has been constantly operating since 1967! And they told you TUBES were unreliable. By the way, last I looked, the "data recorder", which records science data from Voyager on a reel-to-reel data cassette, was still using the SAME cassette since 1967, too! Simply unbelievable at 1967 technology. |
SPOT battery life
In article , Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:44:30 -0500, "Roger Long" wrote: 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/g...eYWUa0SLl40PnT This is starting at 3:30 on election day. It may be a little while before fixes show up. That sounds like pretty good battery life, especially considering that it is transmitting as well as receiving. Does the SPOT device also double as a useful GPS, and is it waterproof enough to take on a dinghy, leave on the flybridge, etc. ? Hey, anyone want one of those 'Spot' devices? I know where there's one just sat on a guy's window ledge... :) Justin. -- Justin C, by the sea. |
SPOT battery life
First fix just came in about 1500.
The unit rode in my suitcase back from MD so it probably did the usual GPS "Where the hell am I?" routine when it turned on hundreds of miles from its last positon. I've also noticed some lag when new tracking pages are set up. It evidently takes a while for things to work through their server. -- Roger Long |
SPOT battery life
Wayne.B wrote:
Does the SPOT device also double as a useful GPS, and is it waterproof enough to take on a dinghy, leave on the flybridge, etc. ? All it does is blink at you so it can't double as a GPS. If you have an Internet connection, you could use the tracking to find out where your were within the last half hour which might bail you out if your primary GPS(s) failed. It's made for backpackers and looks as though it's pretty waterproof. It was originally supposed to function floating with the antenna up but they forgot to have a naval architect check the stability and it floats on its side:) If you are in the water with it, you will have to hold it out of the water which would be a serious energy drain. -- Roger Long |
SPOT battery life
On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:23:09 -0500, Gogarty
wrote: Same here. Nothing there. But then, I have never been able to make SPOT display. I have Java and Java scripts up the gazoo to no effect. What operating system and version of Internet Exploder are you running? |
SPOT battery life
"Gogarty" wrote in message
... In article , says... "Roger Long" wrote in : http://share.findmespot.com/shared/g...JUgIniche7ZeYW Ua0SLl40PnT Redirected me to a new shared page: http://share.findmespot.com/shared/f...pots.jsp?glId= 0VC8x0r9JUgIniche7ZeYWUa0SLl40PnT and then that page shows no input at all at 1648EST 11/4/08 Same here. Nothing there. But then, I have never been able to make SPOT display. I have Java and Java scripts up the gazoo to no effect. I've had the same problem, except it did work at one point. Their tech support was no help. Runs on my laptop with no problem, with IE6. IE7 worked on my desktop a while ago, but something changed and now it doesn't. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
SPOT battery life
"Larry" wrote
Is this what they are?! http://www.batterybank.net/digital/master/aalith.html Yup, that's them. I just realized that the SPOT probably doesn't have a GPS in it but works like the cell phone GPS. All it does in tracking mode is wake up ever 10 minutes and transmit a short series of numbers to the satellite. One is the unit identifier and the other is the raw GPS data received. This little burst probably takes a millisecond. The rest of the time, it's just sleeping unless someone pushes one of the buttons. All the position processing is done on the big computer back in Texas. Everything except the unit ID, is input into the website by the user so does not need to be transmitted. -- Roger Long |
SPOT battery life
"Capt. JG" wrote in
easolutions: but something changed and now it doesn't. Just download Firefox 3. IE sucks. |
SPOT battery life
"Roger Long" wrote in
: I just realized that the SPOT probably doesn't have a GPS in it but works like the cell phone GPS. All it does in tracking mode is wake up ever 10 minutes and transmit a short series of numbers to the satellite. One is the unit identifier and the other is the raw GPS data received. This little burst probably takes a millisecond. The rest of the time, it's just sleeping unless someone pushes one of the buttons. All the position processing is done on the big computer back in Texas. Everything except the unit ID, is input into the website by the user so does not need to be transmitted. It has a full GPS chipset in it. GPS isn't like the old receivers, now. Once they have a fix initially, they resync in milliseconds as soon as the 3rd bird completes its statement. It's quite fast. The GPS won't be far from its last position, so it doesn't have to do a bunch of searching when it's in tracking mode. That's why the battery is so long running. Then it goes back to sleep. |
SPOT battery life
On Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:46:44 -0500, Gogarty
wrote: In article , says... On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:23:09 -0500, Gogarty wrote: Same here. Nothing there. But then, I have never been able to make SPOT display. I have Java and Java scripts up the gazoo to no effect. What operating system and version of Internet Exploder are you running? SPOT tech support was quite useless. I am running Windows XP completely up to date and Firefox 3 though I also have IE 7. SPOT won't show me a shared page on any of them nor on my laptop which is running Windows ME. I just get a blank page with the SPOT logo. Something is getting in the way. I'm using IE 7 with plain vanilla Vista on my home desktop with no problems. Do you have Firewall software installed or pop-up blockers? I'd suspect something like that. |
SPOT battery life
"Larry" wrote in message
... "Capt. JG" wrote in easolutions: but something changed and now it doesn't. Just download Firefox 3. IE sucks. Yeah, I have that as well as others, and it works fine with those. -- "j" ganz @@ www.sailnow.com |
SPOT battery life
On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:44:30 -0500, "Roger Long"
wrote: 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/g...eYWUa0SLl40PnT This could rival watching paint dry. |
SPOT battery life
In article , Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:23:09 -0500, Gogarty wrote: Same here. Nothing there. But then, I have never been able to make SPOT display. I have Java and Java scripts up the gazoo to no effect. What operating system and version of Internet Exploder are you running? There's only one[1][2] OS that runs IE, and it's not one of the good ones. Justin. 1. Many versions, but still the same OS 2. It did run on OS X too until MS stopped supporting it. It was *very* bad though[3]. 3. As is most MS stuff on other platforms. -- Justin C, by the sea. Yeah, so I don't like MS, you wanna make something of it? |
SPOT battery life
Gogarty wrote:
In article , says... In article , Wayne.B wrote: On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:23:09 -0500, Gogarty wrote: Same here. Nothing there. But then, I have never been able to make SPOT display. I have Java and Java scripts up the gazoo to no effect. What operating system and version of Internet Exploder are you running? There's only one[1][2] OS that runs IE, and it's not one of the good ones. Justin. 1. Many versions, but still the same OS 2. It did run on OS X too until MS stopped supporting it. It was *very* bad though[3]. 3. As is most MS stuff on other platforms. -- Justin C, by the sea. Yeah, so I don't like MS, you wanna make something of it? Nope. Have you noticed they have pulled the plug on Vista? Who pulled what plug, Gogrty? -- Richard (remove the X to email) |
SPOT battery life
Gogarty wrote in news:20081106-225644.290.0
@Gogarty.news.bway.net: Nope. Have you noticed they have pulled the plug on Vista? Correction - WE have pulled the plug on Vista. M$ is simply complying with our demands....(c; |
SPOT battery life
On 2008-11-06 21:01:26 -0500, Larry said:
Gogarty wrote in news:20081106-225644.290.0 @Gogarty.news.bway.net: Nope. Have you noticed they have pulled the plug on Vista? Correction - WE have pulled the plug on Vista. M$ is simply complying with our demands....(c; Oh, THAT I can agree with. I have zero MicroS..t products on our (now) 3 machines. Just saw an Infoworld survey the other day that only 3% of companies have switched to Vista in the nearly 2 years it's been out; 57% expect to leapfrog Vista to 7. Having done a switch from NT to XP in our company, they'd have to pay me megabucks to do the same for Vista. And I probably would skip out before they throw the final switch, as I've heard too many of the stories. -- Jere Lull Xan-à-Deux -- Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/ Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/ |
SPOT battery life
November 9, 2008
The last SPOT fix was 0615 this morning and I found the On/Off LED blinking red. This is almost 5 days of 24 hour operation in addition to that listed in the OP. Pretty decent battery life IMHO. -- Roger Long |
SPOT battery life
On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 10:55:35 -0500, "Roger Long"
wrote: November 9, 2008 The last SPOT fix was 0615 this morning and I found the On/Off LED blinking red. This is almost 5 days of 24 hour operation in addition to that listed in the OP. Pretty decent battery life IMHO. Any idea how many total hours you got out of it ? |
SPOT battery life
"Wayne.B" wrote
Any idea how many total hours you got out of it ? No but I'm fairly sure it's well in excess of the 14 days claimed. -- Roger Long |
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