Sabrina and I picked up a SPOT Personal Satellite Messenger (also known as a person tracking device or emergency beacon) at REI before or latest trip to Oregon. I had been eying these devices for a while but never really had a reason to buy one. With the other two participants of the trip who had such a device backing out, i decided the peace of mind was worth it and plopped down my $150 (no sales tax in Oregon, yeah!), paid the $100/year service fee and gave it a whirl.
The device works on some simple priciples and this is reflected in the number of buttons and features. In essence it is a GPS locator device hooked to a satellite data phone. Each of these operations are one way, meaning it only receives GPS signals and broadcasts satellite phone calls. It can not receive any satellite phone messages. As you can see from the picture, there are only 4 buttons and 4 corresponding lights. We’ll get into the features in a minute.
I bought the device for two reasons: 1) I’m a tech gadget geek and it’s kinda cool 2) This trip had unplanned sections possibly in remote areas of Oregon with no cell signal, meaning no one would know where we were or when we were past due. With this device we gave ourselves some lattitude on locations while making it easy to check in with a whole host of people, letting them know everything was ok and our current location.
Now for the buttons:
- ON/OFF
- OK
- Help
- 911
And that’s it. Pretty simple. On/Off is easy to figure out. OK is the button you hit to send a quick OK message (pre-setup on findmespot.com to relate whatever 150 character message you like to any number of email or cell phones you like) to your desired list of friends/family. Holding this button down turns on a tracking feature where your location is broadcast every X number of minutes for something like realtime tracking for folks back home. The Help button will send a pre-defined message to a different list of folks you want to receive it. You can add in different text than the help message but you have to set it up from a web page before hand. This is handy for mechanical and non-life threatening incidences when you can’t get to a phone. 911 is just that. It’s a call for immediate medical help. This message does not go to your buddies, but instead is handled by the fols at SPOT who attempt to contact your emergency contact numbers and then contact local Search and Rescue.
Both the Help and 911 have a cancel feature (hold button for 3 seconds) so you can cancel a emergency request. Both of those modes stay on transmitting your need for help or 911 assistance until you cancel them or the batteries run dead.
In our case I knew there was a chance we might have a mechanical problem and I wanted to be on some of the more remote backroads of Oregon. It was comforting to know I had a list of 4 people within a 5 hour radius who had some mechanical knowledge and were willing to help. It was also comforting to know if things really went south and we were out of cell range, I had a dependable device to call for medical help.
In practical use, you need a bit of sky above you for the signal to get out and we had most of our trip this wasn’t a problem. I hit the OK button at night when we made camp and in the morning, making it easy for those back home to know where we slept. I also hit it at some interesting sites along the way (like Sea Lion Caves and Derrek Cave) just for the heck of it. It worked well from inside the truck sitting near a window. Most of the time I’d place it on the hood. It will send the OK signal three times to make sure one of them gets through. As far as I can tell, it worked every time I activated it.
The device is light enough to take hiking and will hopefully help my parents worry less when we are out in the wilds. While coverage for the whole world is not complete, it should cover us for most of our foreseeable international travels, including a planned trip to Nepal (and if you’re interested in going trekking there this fall, drop me a line!).
It’s a great device which provides a valuable service at a very reasonable cost (about the same as the cost of gasoline to get to some trailheads). At some point I may add the updates to this blog on a longer trip because that would tech geeky.
