As many of you know, I just did a run out to the Farallone Islands from San Francisco this past weekend. I had a SPOT Gen 3 tracker on board. It's set to send position reports in, every 30 minutes. My impression from Saturdays trip was that the tracking function was not reliable, and so I turned it on in the morning on Sunday when I was going to sail back from San Francisco to my berth in San Mateo. Upshot....

Tech support at SPOT tells me that if I power the unit up and push the "Tracking" button, but then later push the "I'm OK / check in" button, that will stop tracking mode. OK, with that in mind, I did a step-by step analysis of my points on the way out and on the way in from the Farallones, and I cannot explain how the various points lined up without imagining that I turned "tracking" on or off FIVE times during the trip, which I did not. I remember turning the unit off once, and starting up tracking once or twice but not five times. I note that every "Check-in" transmission was received, but the "Tracking" transmissions were spotty.

Since I had a bad feeling about this, on Sunday, I turned the SPOT on when I left the CityFront at 11:33. I pressed the "Tracking" button, put it under the lightweight plexi hatch cover where it was safe, and let it run for the whole 4-plus hour run down to San Mateo. I never touched the "I'm OK / Check in" button. This is the exact same location on the boat where it sat for the whole trip out to the Farallones, the day before. Upshot...it sent in a position at 12:33 and then at 1:03, near the Bay Bridge....then nothing until Coyote Point Marina at 3:43. That's a two and a half hour gap, it missed five tracking points. SPOT tech support claims that I passed by SFO, and the airport interfered with the signal. That's bogus, as on Friday on the way up, I hit the "I'm OK/check in" button a couple of times while I wasn't that far from the airport, and it sent signals which were received, logged and showed on the findmespot.com map for my account.

The result is, I no longer trust my SPOT Gen 3 tracker to actually track me reliably. I believe that it will work reliably if I push the "I'm OK / check in" button, but I do not trust the automatic tracking function. I remember that on last summers LongPac race, the SPOT just quit sending signals for no reason, though I didn't know that, at the time.. I powered it off, powered it back on and hit the "Tracking" function again and it still didn't work. I won't be renewing my yearly account with SPOT in two weeks.