I know there is currently a bit of a Spot backlash going on at the moment. I appreciate that the subscriptions hike has pissed off a lot of people but from my perspective I bought a 2nd hand unit and given that I often travel alone and I have a medical condition it gives my wife piece of mind.

Just recently however it was playing up being a bit iffy with messages not being received. There was no low battery warning light but I thought it best to change the batteries to see if it made a difference. To my surprise all the messages started being received fine.

I emailed Spot to see if this was a fault and their response was:-

“the batteries can be powerful enough to power the device i.e. getting green LED lights. However they it is possible the batteries not powerful enough to communicate the satellites”

Am I being a bit thick here but is this a massive floor in their device? If you were in the middle of nowhere and your device was flashing green how would you know if the batteries were low? I did email them back about this but have not had a reply.

Do Spot users here know about this, do you just replace batteries irrespective of the device telling you to?

cheers

I've only changed my batteries when the power light started flashing red to say they were low. My tracking was getting through up to that point. If SPOTs reply is correct then it is a design flaw, the point of the green power light is to tell you the device is working, not to tell you the LED is working. I had trouble getting the tracking/messages to work on the BB200, the envelope light was flashing red. I just turned it off and on again and re-started tracking and then it started working fine after that.

Just watching the evening news and they were talking about Maratime safety discussion rescue messaging systems and recommending people at sea carry these:
http://www.marinesuperstore.com/safety- ... th-gps-plb
They are about £170 new (discounted price), battery lasts 7 years (!), are for sea and land and there are no annual fees....
Granted no tracking or "I'm ok" facility but if you just want a rescue beacon for the "oh poo" moments it may be an alternative??

I think the sooner we start carrying parachute flares the better.

Mine went a bit wonky in the arctic last winter - but I was 4 days into an event and the -27C overnight probably didn't help. I'd checked-in the night before OK, before kipping down for the night but when I started again in the morning, Trackleaders had me 10km offcourse heading in the wrong direction - I got a phone call from my wife to alert me and I changed my batteries. 30 minutes later someone came to find me...

I've also found my Spot not very good under trees - can sometimes drop-out for hours on end even though it's mounted on the back of the bike pointing skywards