Anybody know anything about this? Reliablility? It looks good for those of us who cannot afford a sat phone. Thing that worries me is that it uses globalstar satellites, but supposedly the sat phone transceivers are separate from the transceivers that these gadgets use, and the sat phone transceivers are the only ones that are deteriorating.

Still, I worry they're just trying to dig themselves out of the sat phone hole they're in. It is a great concept though, and reasonable price.

http://www.globalcomsatphone.com/spot/

Very interesting. Thanks for posting the info husky.

I've been pondering a PLB ever since the plane full of skydivers went down recently in an area that I like to frequent. The SAR finally found the wreckage of the missing plane and the bodies of the passengers a mere 200 yards from the last recorded aerial location...a couple days later!!!...even with the use of helicopters and ground personnel!!!

Now, maybe the newspeople were guilty of sensationalizing this a bit, but the fact that it took the searchers that long to find the crumpled wreckage of a pretty large white plane just a short distance away from its last known location has got me thinking pretty hard about laying in for a PLB.

I use the trails as much as the next guy, but do a goodly amount of off-trail stuff when hunting and searching out rarely visited alpine lakes to fish. I'd hate to have my wife to be (and family and friends) worried sick about me for any amount of time. I hate the thought of lugging the weight around, but perhaps it is time to get one.

I'm not too keen on the Globalstar component...aren't their sats teetering on the verge of collapse?

Allen

Hi Allen, I'd heard about that crash but had not followed the particulars. I didn't know the SAR took so long. I've thought about joining Yakima County SAR many times, but I'm over an hour away from there.

Yes, the Globalstar component is worrisome. It is claimed that the problem lies entirely with the duplex channels for sat-phone comm. This device only uses a simplex channel that is probably also a different frequency from the duplex channels, and this function is doing just fine. I don't know how much of that to believe.

http://www.equipped.com/SPOT_ORSummer2007.htm

Correction, their simplex channel uses frequency-hopping. Duplex does not. The former is already a technology in place and used to track shipments.

So...is the unit and supporting technological infrastructure good to go?

Apparently good to go, and already going in the shipping biz, but definitely read that equipped.com review. I'd like to see some reviews of folks who've used it, but that won't happen until after Nov. 1 when they're available. It's hard to know at this point, but I'll be keeping my eye on this.

I really like the concept of multiple alert levels of messaging, and the fact that my family can track me at home.

Hopefully it works better than the Globalstar phones...I recently used one off and on for a week and it had very spotty reception...even on lakeshores with 3/4 open sky. It was very frustrating to whip out the Garmin and see 10-12 birds, yet the phone couldn't pick anything up.

Yep, Globalstar's sat-phone biz is in the toilet. I haven't heard a single good thing about it from their customers. And really, even if their simplex channel is doing fine, what is the company's future economically? Suppose you get one of these plb's and then the company goes under?

It is such a good concept though. I'm watching and hoping that if SPOT does not do well, someone else will take it and run.

WOW. just what I've been looking for. I've been putting off thr plb because of cost, but this is very reasonable. I hardly use existing trials at all.

Positive reports had been trickling in so I pulled the trigger on one of these units. On my initial test, in the front yard, with a good sized snowstorm going on, it sent an email with coordinates that were about 5 feet from where the unit was placed.

Pretty impressive.

One of these SPOT doodads quite literally saved the lives of a couple guys recently in our area. SAR teams went right to them, general consensus is that they probably would not have survived until the next day in the storm that was raging and the (lack of) gear they had.

I would highly recommend one for those who recreate in the winter. I'm no sales guy, just a SAR occasional volunteer. Summertime losties can usually last a few days. When things go bad in the winter, people die quickly.

The globalstar network seems to do just fine at transmitting the location every five minutes. It's a significantly smaller effort than carrying someone's conversation, at which they seem to be still having difficulty.

SD