The TD organizers keep reiterating that the SPOT trackers can accidentally turn off. Several racers appear to be still at the start. They are fairly accurate when turned on, but lack of movement should be interpenetrated as a possible SPOT failure.
When reading the webpage showing Kent's progress on the SPOT, there are only the last 50 points are displayed (numbered backwards for some bizarre reason). Fifty points can be considerably less that a full day (we're seeing on average about 70 points a day). You can check the previous pages for previous points. Unfortunately there appears to be a maximum capacity for the display -- i can't tell if it's 7 days, 350 points or 10 pages, but points from about a week ago are disappearing.
I have not been able to figure out how to download the tracking points from the SPOT page although it has been suggested that it is possible. If anyone figures that out, please let me know - it would be great to store them.
Hasten Slowly,
Mark
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If you have access to his spot account, this is the easiest way to get the track points:
http://www.findmespot.ca/en/index.php?cid=209
Otherwise you can manually get the data by following the instructions on this page:
http://www.findmespot.ca/en/index.php?cid=1700
But its harder to deal with.
ryan
Go Kent!
It would appear that the problems with these tracking devices are universal......
What really matters is that you're having fun.
Mark - if you use the SPOT-owned https://www.spotadventures.com tie-in site, you can pull as many dates worth of SPOT data you need into a single trip. You can even add pictures if he's sending them in.
You could possibly update a single "adventure" manually daily with the latest progress, or you could keep creating new ones with the latest progress.
Here's one of my trip with a lot of points across the whole country: http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view?trip_id=174250
Also, the SPOT tracking function automatically shuts off after 24 hours, presumably to save satellite bandwidth. So if both lights have stopped flashing, but the left one still is, that means it's still powered on but back in the idle state. Just need to hold the OK button to throw it back into tracking mode.
If, on the other hand, it's dying entirely, that's something I haven't seen, and sounds more like a hardware issue.
It looks like the complete XML for his trip is available at http://share.findmespot.com/messageService/guestlinkservlet?glId=0E7YENXP93i38ggdEzWpdZaF3tStCe8MG&completeXml=true
I'm pretty sure I can get that into Google Maps without too much fuss. I'll take a crack at it in a moment.
Before I noticed that the leaderboard linked to individual riders' full info (here's Kent's), I put together a quick Google Maps page with his tracker updates on it. The only advantage mine has, that I can see, is that I have some of the data from before the race started.
I'll keep mine updated, and if nothing else I'll be able to send you the pre-race data that I have, if you can't get it any other way.
Ah, I see that the public view is limited to a 7-day timespan:
The public and password-protected pages show data for a time span you specify, from 24 hours to 7 days.
During or after your trip, you can go to the SPOT web site and download your data points in a variety of formats. [...] The data that's available when you log in to your account goes back for a whole month, not just 24 hours.
I don't have a SPOT device, so I can't help with how to pull the month's worth of data off their site when you're logged in. But I did fix my map page (link above) so that it shows all the points that have been available since it started running, not just the last seven days' worth.
I've put up a KML feed of Kent's SPOT updates, in case anyone wants to play with that.
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