Spot Tracking

The other day, Greg bought the original Spot One GPS Personal Tracker for $60 on ebay. It arrived and today I activated it in order to start doing some testing.

For the first test, I put it in tracking mode and set it on the corner of my back deck. Tracking mode is what you use to record and share your journey (hike, etc) with others in close to real-time. The spot is supposed to send an update to it's coordinates every ten minutes. So the test was to simply leave it in one spot for over an hour and see how close the grouping of updates was. I figured this should give an idea of it's accuracy when we actually go to recover the equipment.

Note: I assume that the google maps image is lined up perfectly with the actual latitude and longitude, which it likely is not.

The red dot is the actual location that the unit sat for the test. I measured from that location to spot #7 and found that it was 136 feet away. If there are not multiple updates by the time we get to the impact site, we may have roughly a 150 foot search radius.