Some time ago I had a cross-country trip from Lawrenceville, GA to San Diego, CA. When my Uncle and I went on the trip, Dad bought us a Spot Satellite GPS Messenger for safety and tracking reasons. Using the Spot, we could report our position to the appropriate authorities using the GEOS International Emergency Response Center or have the Spot upload our position to Spot’s servers every 10 minutes. While we did not have to use the “help” button, we did use the tracking functionality. The tracking functionality let us keep a record of our position along the flight and also have our semi-realtime position uploaded online for friends and relatives to track.
When the trip was over, I archived the position data from the Spot so that if the data was deleted, because our Spot subscription expired or something, I would have it. Sadly, on the way back from the trip the Spot died for mysterious reasons – Dad, Uncle and I think its because of the heat, though Spot disagrees. Due to this, we don’t have complete data for the flight back; I just have data from Ramona, CA to Deming, NM. I excluded this data as it pretty much replicates the flight out to California.
Recently, I rediscovered the data and decided to make a Google Map of the data out. Bit of reading on the Google Map API and I had all the data in a map with info windows stating where we stopped to sleep or refuel. Very cool.
If you want to play with the map, click here.
