Questions For SPOT Gen 3 Owners

I recently bought the SPOT Gen 3 device and am having issues with it. I set up today, created account, put all my messages in and all went well. Got my email confirmation. Then I took a 20-30 minute walk in my neighborhood to check how it works. I brought my phone so I'd get the texts and e-mails real time to see delays, etc. (Walk I took is pretty much in the open with excellent cell service and GPS availability).

My biggest question is what exactly does the manual mean by holding a button until the light "blinks"? I walked about 5 minutes down the road and hit the "OK" button until the light briefly blinked green. The GPS and message lights were blinking green but no text or message for nearly 5 minutes. Just blinking lights. I tried same thing. No blink. So I held button waiting for something and it blinked red. I assume that canceled message per manual. I probably did a total of 5 OK presses but never got any messages from any of them. I powered unit off and on. I hit the Help Button until I got a solid green light. Let it go and about a minute later I got a text and email. I held again for a red and about a minute later and I got a cancel message. So I then hit OK button until it was solid green and a minute later I got an OK text and email. A hundred yards down the road I hit again an only got a blink. If I held waiting for a solid light I went back to red. ??? I've been through the manual and see no distinction at all between a quick blink and a solid light. The solid light definitely seemed to be the way to get a message to work but I didn't always get the solid light.

So what is the deal? Am I trying to get a quick blink or a solid light? If I transmit a quick blink do I have to wait until everything stops before my next press? I believe manual said that can take up to 20 minutes. If anyone out there owns one of these units I'd appreciate some feedback. Thought it was going to be pretty idiot-proof when I researched but it is proving to be not the case. Have zero confidence in this thing right now.

I didn't really follow all of your button presses, or how long you pressed them. And I don't know about Gen3, but with Gen1 and Gen2, it can take up to 20 minutes for an OK message to be sent after you press the button. Two green lights will briefly flash. However, if you press the OK button a second time before the first message had a chance to be sent, the clock starts over again for the second press, and the first message is cancelled. Keep pressing the OK button too soon and a location message will never get out.

Since you got at least one Ok message I imagine you configured your e-mail & phone number correctly for Ok messages. I think for the next step you should log into your Spot account and you should check which of the messages actually went through. I suspect you will discover that the first Ok message didn't make it. You may not have been paying attention to this but once Spot gets a satellite fix it will start blinking "Sending message" light. If you don't see it then the gps probably didn't get a fix, so Spot doesn't know what location to transmit. Also according to the manual (page 14): "If no GPS location is found in 4 minutes, SPOT does not send your message. To try again, simply press and hold the function button." Separately, assuming that you got a fix and message was being sent, you may not have had any satellites passing over at the moment, so possibly one of the subsequent transmissions could have gone through if you waited long enough. I think the best way for you to test and see what goes through is to turn on tracking mode. Then if you get tracking points but no Ok message then most likely you don't get a gps fix within 4 minutes.

When I go hiking where there is no phone signal, I usually transmit Ok or Custom messages twice just to make sure at least one transmission goes through. I also used goog.gl URL shortening service (owned by Google) to shorten address for my tracking page and inserted this short link into all messages. Thus my family doesn't need to remember where my tracking page is as long as they have at least one message that I sent them from Spot.

Finally, make sure that your batteries are fully charged. I noticed that if my batteries have low charge then the lights will blink but a lot fewer messages seem to make it.

Account definitely set up and configured correctly. I logged in twice after my walk to confirm all the settings had remained unchanged.

I think I have the quick flash / solid flash thing worked out. I used the unit on my drive to work today. First time I hit OK until I got a quick flash and within a minute or so I got my text/email. Second time I hit OK I got the solid light and again within a minute I got the text/email. The third time I hit OK I got the red light. So I held it again and got the solid green light again and within a minute I got the text/email. So I'm guessing the message cycle length does vary considerably and when I get a solid green it is because the cycle completed but I get the red if it it has not completed the redundant messages (even though I got the message).

I also tried the tracking feature too while driving. I will say when the messages/tracks go through they appear to be extremely accurate. I made mental note of the places I hit the OK button and it was right on the money.

Only issue now is the Custom button does not appear to work. No matter how often or how long I press this button I get no light of any kind. Not sure if it is set up wrong on the site or if the unit may be defective. Need to do more research on that. Hoping it is not defective.

Nessmuk said:

I didn't really follow all of your button presses, or how long you pressed them. And I don't know about Gen3, but with Gen1 and Gen2, it can take up to 20 minutes for an OK message to be sent after you press the button. Two green lights will briefly flash. However, if you press the OK button a second time before the first message had a chance to be sent, the clock starts over again for the second press, and the first message is cancelled. Keep pressing the OK button too soon and a location message will never get out.

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When I am actually out hiking it is highly unlikely I'd hit it more than every 60 minutes or so. I just wanted to make a dry run with the unit to make sure I understood how it was working. Their website is a little weird too. The pages don't automatically refresh apparently. When I set up my custom messages they were all reflected on screen but when I went back they hadn't changed. So I hit "save" after each action I did and it was OK. And on the map I deleted the points I had created yesterday so I could see just the stuff I did today. I hit delete and confirmed but yesterday's points were still there. I refreshed the page and they were gone. Did this on two different computers with same issue. Not really a big deal now that I understand it but a little strange.

DayTrip said:

Only issue now is the Custom button does not appear to work. No matter how often or how long I press this button I get no light of any kind. Not sure if it is set up wrong on the site or if the unit may be defective. Need to do more research on that. Hoping it is not defective.

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If custom button does not seem to work, I would first observe if its LED lights up during power up when all of the lights are blinking. If it does, but pressing a button itself does not bring the LED on then I would guess it is either a hardware problem with a button or some software problem. Did you check if there is a firmware update for your Spot? I had a firmware update right after bought it but none afterwards. If firmware update doesn't help then get it replaced / fixed.

DayTrip said:

I also tried the tracking feature too while driving. I will say when the messages/tracks go through they appear to be extremely accurate. I made mental note of the places I hit the OK button and it was right on the money.

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I think if you want to test accuracy of your Spot you should compare it to traces from a trusted GPS. My Spot is pretty accurate most of the time but not always - there were times where it was way off and it became a subject of jokes among my family like one time I "hiked" 6.3 miles in 10 minutes or there was a sudden 0.6 mile "side-jump" from the trail. See example below: first is the original screen shot from Spot web site and then comparison to my Garmin traces (in red):


Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that if you keep tracking turned on then it will be a lot easier for rescuers to rule out a bad point from your track then if you just send one location. I wrote a bit more about Spot accuracy on WhiteBlaze in the aftermath of Kate Matrosova's death and there were some follow-up comments, so you may want to take a look at them: http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php/109250-Mt-Madison-(NH)-Rescue?p=1948604#post1948604

Hi DayTrip-

I use my SPOT Gen3 quite a bit... with good success. I sent you a PM.

Beth

iAmKrzys said:

If custom button does not seem to work, I would first observe if its LED lights up during power up when all of the lights are blinking. If it does, but pressing a button itself does not bring the LED on then I would guess it is either a hardware problem with a button or some software problem. Did you check if there is a firmware update for your Spot? I had a firmware update right after bought it but none afterwards. If firmware update doesn't help then get it replaced / fixed.


I think if you want to test accuracy of your Spot you should compare it to traces from a trusted GPS. My Spot is pretty accurate most of the time but not always - there were times where it was way off and it became a subject of jokes among my family like one time I "hiked" 6.3 miles in 10 minutes or there was a sudden 0.6 mile "side-jump" from the trail. See example below: first is the original screen shot from Spot web site and then comparison to my Garmin traces (in red):
View attachment 5185
View attachment 5186
Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that if you keep tracking turned on then it will be a lot easier for rescuers to rule out a bad point from your track then if you just send one location. I wrote a bit more about Spot accuracy on WhiteBlaze in the aftermath of Kate Matrosova's death and there were some follow-up comments, so you may want to take a look at them: http://www.whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php/109250-Mt-Madison-(NH)-Rescue?p=1948604#post1948604

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I used the SPOT on my drive to work the past 2 days and I think I have figured out my "problem". Apparently when a pushed button is still in its message cycle hitting another button will register no response until the previous button is canceled. Once I have canceled and then push another button I get the solid green light and for subsequent pushes I get the blinking light. After rereading the manual it does technically explain it but they could have done a better job with the explanation of the lights, quick blink vs solid, etc.

I should also point out that I emailed customer service about my "issue" and received a reply within about 12 hours and a follow up email after that by a person who was going to call me before I canceled. When I was researching various units I recall several people mentioning SPOT's customer service being horrible. Seemed OK to me FWIW.

iAmKrzys said:

I think if you want to test accuracy of your Spot you should compare it to traces from a trusted GPS. My Spot is pretty accurate most of the time but not always - there were times where it was way off and it became a subject of jokes among my family like one time I "hiked" 6.3 miles in 10 minutes or there was a sudden 0.6 mile "side-jump" from the trail. See example below: first is the original screen shot from Spot web site and then comparison to my Garmin traces (in red):
View attachment 5185
View attachment 5186

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This behavior is typical of some of the older generations of GPS technology. (I've also seen a cellphone GPS exhibit it too.) Perhaps SPOT is not using the best GPS and/or GPS antenna technology...

As with a GPS, where you carry it can also be a factor. The best practical place to carry it is generally in to top of your pack with the GPS antenna pointed upward. There is also the question of the best orientation for the communications antenna (which may or may not coincide with that of the GPS antenna).

One other factor is that SPOT only transmits a location every 10 minutes. If one assumes that the GPS receiver is also only operated every 10 minutes (to save power), this would also degrade accuracy compared to a GPS operating continuously. (The first couple of locations found by a GPS when you turn it on will often be less accurate (sometimes wildly inaccurate) than those found after operating for a while. However, we often (generally?) ignore those first couple of points.)

Doug

DougPaul said:

This behavior is typical of some of the older generations of GPS technology. (I've also seen a cellphone GPS exhibit it too.) Perhaps SPOT is not using the best GPS and/or GPS antenna technology...

As with a GPS, where you carry it can also be a factor. The best practical place to carry it is generally in to top of your pack with the GPS antenna pointed upward. There is also the question of the best orientation for the communications antenna (which may or may not coincide with that of the GPS antenna).

One other factor is that SPOT only transmits a location every 10 minutes. If one assumes that the GPS receiver is also only operated every 10 minutes (to save power), this would also degrade accuracy compared to a GPS operating continuously. (The first couple of locations found by a GPS when you turn it on will often be less accurate (sometimes wildly inaccurate) than those found after operating for a while. However, we often (generally?) ignore those first couple of points.)

Doug

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I would be very nervous with that kind of performance in a rescue beacon....did you call tech support and ask them how that kind of inaccuracy is removed if the SOS button is pressed.

Remix said:

I would be very nervous with that kind of performance in a rescue beacon....did you call tech support and ask them how that kind of inaccuracy is removed if the SOS button is pressed.

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I actually did ask Spot Tech Support in an e-mail and here is what they wrote to me:

"Your SPOT may report locations erroneously when the device is in contact with only 02 satellites. This should happen only from time to time and normally is a result of an environmental block, such as being in wooded areas or near mountain ranges. The error is corrected in a situation where you emit a HELP or an SOS message. These messages are a higher priority message and are emitted once every 05 minutes for maximum coverage and visibility of the satellites. The Help will emit messages continuously for one hour and will need to be re emitted after one hour has lapsed. The SOS will emit a message once every 05 minutes until the the message is cancelled, the batteries are exhausted, or the device is powered off. The messaging occurring more frequently will correct the location error due to only 02 satellites being in view and reporting the location incorrectly."

I didn't quite buy the argument of environmental block, and I listed my reasons as follows:

"While I understand that the fewer the satellites gps is locked onto the worse the accuracy, I really doubt that in my case they were obstructed from view by trees or terrain since my Garmin had no problem locking onto enough satellites to give me pretty good accuracy.

The only differences I can think of are:
1) the receiver on Spot is not as sensitive as that on Garmin
2) Spot purposefully attempts to extend battery life and doesn't make best effort for tracking purposes
3) the software or hardware on Spot needed to filter out signal bounce is not as good/mature as on my Garmin
4) the software still has bugs that should be investigated and fixed (I debug code for living, so I doubt anything sophisticated can be totally bug-free.)"

DougPaul said:

One other factor is that SPOT only transmits a location every 10 minutes. If one assumes that the GPS receiver is also only operated every 10 minutes (to save power), this would also degrade accuracy compared to a GPS operating continuously.

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I think the only fair comparison between Spot & a hiking gps is if we look at points with same time stamps. I don't have any tools to throw away points from my Garmin traces that are not recorded at the same time as those of Spot, but if I look at points where Spot trace "turns" (i.e. locations actually recorded) many of them are really close to my Garmin trace but there are a few that are off by more than 0.5 miles.

iAmKrzys said:

I think the only fair comparison between Spot & a hiking gps is if we look at points with same time stamps. I don't have any tools to throw away points from my Garmin traces that are not recorded at the same time as those of Spot, but if I look at points where Spot trace "turns" (i.e. locations actually recorded) many of them are really close to my Garmin trace but there are a few that are off by more than 0.5 miles.

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You can make meaningful comparisons without the time stamps as long as you carry both the SPOT and the GPS on the same route and the GPS is recording a continuous track at close (enough) intervals. Assuming the GPS to be accurate, the SPOT locations should be on the GPS track. (You may not be able to check along-track errors without the timestamps, but you certainly can check cross-track errors.)

I have made objective comparisons of the repeatability of a GPS by hiking/walking/biking out on a route and returning by the same route*. One can compute the cross-track repeatability of the out and back segments without using the timestamps. (I could measure repeatability, but not absolute accuracy because the routes were not surveyed. Repeatability is necessary for accuracy, but you could have a constant offset which would degrade accuracy but not repeatability.)
* See http://www.vftt.org/forums/showthread.php?14406-Bakeoff-plus-Tecumseh-hike

Remember, the rescuers only have access to the SPOT 10min interval track. They may find it difficult to distinguish between good and "not so good" trackpoints. In any case, several obviously implausible trackpoints will likely decrease their confidence in the entire track.

Doug

iAmKrzys said:

I actually did ask Spot Tech Support in an e-mail and here is what they wrote to me:

The only differences I can think of are:
1) the receiver on Spot is not as sensitive as that on Garmin
2) Spot purposefully attempts to extend battery life and doesn't make best effort for tracking purposes
3) the software or hardware on Spot needed to filter out signal bounce is not as good/mature as on my Garmin
4) the software still has bugs that should be investigated and fixed (I debug code for living, so I doubt anything sophisticated can be totally bug-free.)"[/I]

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As long as it produces many different position estimates (calculations) to rescuers, I would feel confident that a single bad point would not create a problem.

I have seen sudden jumps in a gps track like you have described (though not 6/10ths of a mile). In my experience, this is because the unit has just switched to a different constellation (in other words - group) of satellites to calculate a position. Think of computing a GPS position as building a house of cards. When a new constellation is chosen, the house falls and the cards have to be stacked up again until they make a stable structure. I hope that is an easier way of saying that a Kalman filter (or any other kind of numerical recipe) has to forget everything it has "learned" and must re-start from scratch.

The other source of the problem comes from marketing departments. Not to open an old debate, but some GPS units claim a much higher sensitivity than other GPS units even though they are very much equal. The "superior" GPS units produce garbage-like noisy positions that drift all over the place when the signal is weak, but as the "inferior" GPS units are designed to report loss of lock instead of garbage-like noisy position data with the same weak signal.

I'm fairly satisfied with my Spot Gen 3. I generally just turn on Spot Gen 3 to send OK messages. It does take long time for unit to go thru the send cycle. Just now to run a quick test, I turned on Spot outside on deck. I pressed OK button. I held it down until OK and Power lights lit up simultaneously. The GPS light lights up indicating it is communicating to GPS satellites. Then after a short time OK, Send, and Power light begin to blink simultaneously. This means it is attempting to send msg via comm satellites. Then I went in house to drink my coffee and watch the email. I think it continues attempting to send some number of times. I finally received my OK email after 11 minutes time. As good as can be expecting considering there are 3 separate big global systems being navigated. I don't generally stop long enough on a hike to wait amount of time it takes to send these OK messages. Idealy I should send an ok message when I get back to TH, but I'm generally in big hurry to get on the road and forget to do so in sufficient time to send a message so these frequently don't get sent because I don't leave unit on long enough which is a PITA.

I brought unit in the house and tried to send OK message from dining room table. The Power light, OK, Send lights blink simultaneously, but Send Light is RED. Meaning no signal I guess. Short answer is don't continue to press OK button as it must cancel previous message.

I took mine out on the Hancock Loop today and it seemed OK. I clipped to my chest strap. I sent 9 check ins and got a text and an email for each one and the location looked pretty accurate. Based on length of my hike I should have had 36 track posts and I only had 26, one of which was an erroneous outlier. I have almost no tracks showing down in the valley so I assume the tree cover affected it. Big thing for me is that all the check ins went through. I got it to communicate my status with my wife. I have a GPS and PLB for mission critical stuff. Looks like it will do what I bought it for.

DayTrip said:

Based on length of my hike I should have had 36 track posts and I only had 26, one of which was an erroneous outlier.

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It's not unusual for me to have 30 or 40 minute gaps in my track. I think the device has to make some compromises between how hard it tries to send tracking messages and battery life. Sometimes it seems to me that it is somewhat related to how well my batteries are charged. I generally don't worry much about this as long as the transmissions go through at least once an hour. My thinking here is that if I fell off a cliff and hurt myself badly enough that I couldn't move and activate SOS button than hopefully at least some location would get sent before the unit turned itself off (1 hour w/o motion.)

DougPaul said:

You can make meaningful comparisons without the time stamps as long as you carry both the SPOT and the GPS on the same route and the GPS is recording a continuous track at close (enough) intervals. Assuming the GPS to be accurate, the SPOT locations should be on the GPS track. (You may not be able to check along-track errors without the timestamps, but you certainly can check cross-track errors.)

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I agree that the likelihood that a trackpoint recorded by SPOT falls perfectly on a later faraway segment of my Garmin-recorded track is very small, so just looking at the "closeness" of both tracks whenever SPOT reports a point should be sufficient in order to tell if SPOT's estimate of location is sensible or not.

Remix said:

I have seen sudden jumps in a gps track like you have described (though not 6/10ths of a mile). In my experience, this is because the unit has just switched to a different constellation (in other words - group) of satellites to calculate a position. Think of computing a GPS position as building a house of cards. When a new constellation is chosen, the house falls and the cards have to be stacked up again until they make a stable structure. I hope that is an easier way of saying that a Kalman filter (or any other kind of numerical recipe) has to forget everything it has "learned" and must re-start from scratch.

Click to expand...

I imagine that Spot's tracking mode works somewhat like this:
1) wake up every 10 minutes and turn on the gps radio for 30 seconds (or some other short interval)
2) try to identify as many satellites in view as possible filtering out noisy data
3) asses the accuracy of the reading
4) if the reading seems ok then try sending it out
5) go to sleep until next cycle should start

I imagine that there is a somewhat limited value in previous location since Spot cannot tell if, for example, we switched from hiking to driving a car. Nevertheless, last state should be a pretty good starting point for figuring out next location although I am not sure how easy it is to feed into whatever noise-reduction method Spot uses. While Spot has a motion sensor of some sort, I am almost certain it is not used in gps feedback loop as having a decent speed estimate would at least allow throwing away bad readings at step 4.

There is no way to tell how many satellites Spot locks on to but my Garmin eTrex 30 almost always reports signal from 7 or more satellites. I guess it does not have a limitation by which it would have to shut itself down every 10 minutes, so it can do a better job of maintaining and re-calibrating its state over time. I often use two of my GPS units (I also have an older Garmin Vista HCX) for the purpose of recording tracks and marking trails on OpenStreetMap. Over time I have compared probably hundreds of miles of track from my two GPS devices, and whenever I walk the same trail back and forth eTrex 30 seems to be a bit more consistent with itself (on average I would say no more than 30 feet of spread between tracks along same path) while the older Vista shows more of a variance (maybe occasionally 70 feet spread) but definitely nothing as big as 6/10ths of a mile. Here is an example from Bartlett Mountain hike (following same path up & down):

As you can see in enlargement, Vista HCX is less consistent but still within 70 feet of its own recording and definitely nothing that would be way off.

I don't know what Spot reports in SOS mode but it could be more helpful if it reported several past location with timestamps in each transmission, so if rescuers get to see bad data points they can have an easier time identifying outliers. While in my experience Spot support was responsive, I don't know if any of my comments really got past the "support firewall."

Spot devices were required equipment for the first ever Yukon 1000 mile canoe race (Y1K) in 2009. Since then the other shorter Yukon races (such as the more popular 440 mile Yukon River Quest) now also require that Spot be used, and to be in 10-minute tracking mode. Teams must demonstrate Spot tracking proficiency on the internet to the race director at home before being allowed to participate in the Yukon races. Apart from the obvious safety issues, Spot is used to verify that teams remain at one location for the mandated 6 hour "night" rest stop every 24 hours during the Y1K. My team also has a pre-plan with our ground team that the "help" function would signal that we are generally healthy but are leaving the competition for some non-emergency reason, and please meet us at the next available take-out (which could still be a couple hundred miles yet further downstream), and continue to monitor our moving location signal. Thankfully we haven't had to use that mode yet.

I'll never forget at the 2009 director's final team meeting in Whitehorse where he said "the greatest sin is to not configure your Spot properly...". There would be a time penalty assessed to teams for not reporting in via Spot on a regular interval during the day, especially for not verifying the 6 hour stop location where ever we happened to end up each night, and started paddling no less than 6 hours later. Track mode was not required in 2009, but sending a periodic OK signal was required (10 minute track mode was required to be active in subsequent years). Proper mounting of Spot, with the patch antenna pointing unobstructed toward the sky was a must and was stressed to the teams.

However, some teams chose to put their Spot in a pocket, or hanging vertically from a lanyard, or otherwise improperly mounted to see the sky. Doing so, they lost many of the required periodic signal transmissions. I mounted mine on the open front deck of my canoe, and every required location transmission was received by the race director. Crews that did it otherwise accumulated severe time penalties, in one case totaling as much as 9 hours over the week-long race!!! Since 2009 races now require Spot to be in track mode. With my mounting, every manual OK signal made out in 2009. In later races very few automatic 10 minute interval track transmissions were lost, most of those being in areas of deep east/west canyons with high terrain immediately to our south blocked sight of the satellites at our 60+ degrees latitude north. I also have accumulated hundreds of track transmissions from other teams since 2009. A few segments here and there are lost, but for the most part through 2014 I have exact locations for several dozens of race teams at 10 minute intervals. I use the fastest to further refine my own planning path for future races on the Yukon. It is true however, that sometimes, though rarely, a single Spot location point will seem a little out of whack.