I try to be fairly active outdoors, however I’ve never done enough to justify something like SPOT. For those that are not aware of what it is, SPOT is a device you take hiking, camping, wherever; you pay a small fee for monitoring and if you get yourself in trouble you hit the button, it transmits via satellite your GPS coords to the monitoring center, and they contact the correct (and nearest) authority. The big point of SPOT is to have a SAR team on speed dial basically. However, I have some beef about this; the reason is many SAR teams respond to the police, and thats it. However, that doesn’t make this any less useful. On top of those emergency services, SPOT can also send emails, SMS messages, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. You can basically keep track of your trip, and let your friends know where you are without messing around with a cell phone and reception. Very cool for sure.
Now, lets talk about the new SPOT Connect. A problem with SPOT is it is this great device, however you do all the configuring before you leave home, and you carry a device with basically 3 buttons (I’m OK, Help, and 911). You can set I’m OK to send facebook messages, or things of that nature. But that is it; no screen, nothing. So the SPOT connect takes the same GPS tracking and communication, and adds bluetooth; this way you can control it all from your smartphone. Pretty cool eh? Check it out.
