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

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. ?

"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.

"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.

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.

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

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

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?

"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

"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