Though my first SPOT test entry garnered no comments, I remain convinced that some boaters will go for this gadget/service once they fully understand what it can do for them.

Actually, out on the water is where it may perform the most reliably. I've been trying SPOT in some tough situations and am learning that it really needs a good sky view to work well. I had it out in the streets of New York City for several hours last week, and I don't think it ever got a GPS position, and it only twice got a message off. By contrast, a little Lowrance XOG could regularly get a fix on these same streets (same place I last tried the AnyTrack, not mid town but with many tall buildings).

Now it's true that SPOT does not claim that it can work in urban canyons, but I wonder about wilderness canyons or places with heavy, wet leaf cover. And I don't understand why it isn't able to indicate if it has a GPS fix, despite having four bi-color LEDs. On the other hand, it did pretty well–much better than AnyTrack–recording a Portland-Camden round trip, only missing maybe 20% of its every 10 minute track points with only the sky view available from my dash. And you can see above and below that it did well with a "Help" message sent from my driveway yesterday, and that's despite all the wet snow that was glommed onto the trees.

According to the manual, once activated, SPOT will send the help message and position every five minutes for an hour, thus assuring delivery. You can see above how I got four emails in 40 minutes. Note that the message "This is a HELP message from Ben Ellison's SPOT satellite messenger. Please send help to the location below, ASAP" can be modified at the SPOT Web site, and might be used to send something like, "Hey, dudes, they're biting over here." to a bunch of buddies via email and cell text message. What else will people think of for SPOT uses?