GPSOZ

Hi All,

I was at my mates place over the weekend and he was showing me his SPOT Messenger.

It's really peaked my interest in them as a great thing for the family to follow when the mates and I do an occasional long distance motorcycle ride.

My question is related to the website he showed me were his journey's are stored. Apparently the points are stored for 30 days and then deleted.

We couldn't for the life of us find this piece of information, Can we save those points from a journey to an I think KML or KMZ file for importing into either OzIExplorer or back into Google Earth later?

They'd make a great permanent record of our adventures!

Geoff

Log into your spot account at findmespot.com, click on the messages TAB, then click on the KML (Google Earth format), GPX or CSV format buttons. This will create a file on your PC in the format selected. Then fire up your appliction and open the saved file.

All done

cheers
brian

Hi Brian,
I just rang my mate and talked him through your suggestion, it worked treat!

He even emailed me the file and I was able to import it into Google Maps for a look see.

I think I'll be contacting your friendly team in the next couple of months for one of those jiggers of my own!

Geoff

Hi Geoff

Check out the SPOT trip Manager site http://jasonjonas.org/spot/about.jsp run by Jason Jonas. It is a great free website for SPOT users. It allows you to set up separate trips and it also stores your data for ever (not just 30 days).

A couple of us on this forum have been using Jason's site for the past 6 months and find it to give a better output than the SPOT site. The things that we like are:
- all the positions sent in each trip are joined by a line so it is much easier to follow the traveller's trip
- you can set up whether you want to allow the viewers to your site to be able to download a KML file of your trip
- you can password protect each trip
- for each trip STM (SPOT Trip Manager) shows the first position with an S (Start) and when you pass the end date you set up for the trip, it will show your last position as a F (Finish). Whilst you are travelling, your last sent position it shown as a bike rider.

Have a look at one of our trips. The link to the trip is http://jasonjonas.org/spot/tripViewer.do?id=1128 and the password is forum. BTW, I also use the unlimited tracking option shown on the map as orange positions (Fire Eagle). The green positions are manually sent positions with a predefined message (All is OK at our overnight spot). I sent a manual position at the start of each day so viewers can see where we stopped.

The downsides of Jason's site?
- It usually takes up to 15 minutes for SPOT to send data to STM. This is only a problem with you are tracking someone and want to know where they are that minute.
- The longitude is missing one decimal point - it only tracks to 3 decimal points and it should be 4. Jason is aware of this and is trying to get it fixed. This may mean your position is out by 50 metres.
- It is not user friendly to set up the previous trips page. I found it by mistake. Up until now, I have been sending friends a link to each new trip. However, it is possible to give friends a link to a summary of your trips, which means they don't have to know each particular trip number to log in.

The upside
- a much more user friendly site without losing your old data.

Laurie