A little while ago I wrote about the demise of my SPOT Connect resulting in my sending it off to Pivotel for a warranty claim. Well the news is mostly good. The SPOT Connect has a 12 month warranty and my unit was replaced. I can't say for sure if it was replaced with a brand new unit but they didn't fix mine and send it back. The unit they sent had been "tested" prior to shipping to me and the SOS button cover that flips out doesn't sit too flush on this unit so my gut tells me it wasn't brand new but I'm also a cynic.
Anyhow, I got the opportunity to take the replacement SPOT Connect for a spin a couple of weeks ago and I was pretty happy. The unit performed better than my original SPOT had ever done. Having said that, there's still a few things worth noting-
- Once on this ride it turned itself off without any reason. I restarted it and all was good.
- Battery life isn't really more than a couple of days in use at best when you are riding 18 hours per day. What I did do was kick off the tracking via bluetooth on my iPhone, turn bluetooth off on the phone to disconnect the SPOT and then trun bluetooth back on to pair the phone with my GPS unit. It seems to me that leaving the bluetooth connection active between the phone and the SPOT Connect drains the batteries quicker.
- The coloured lights on the SPOT are confusing. While riding along, particuarly at some speed I was seeing all manner of combinations of flashing red and green lights on the SPOT Connect. The expected combination was green on the power and green on the messaging flashing intermittently. I was seeing red on power, green on messaging, three reds (including the satellite indicator light, and various other combinations. The red power light implies battery issues but many many times it changed back to green after a while. Things also seemed to sort themselves out if I was slowed down or I stopped for break or fuel, even after 30 hours or so riding I couldn't make any sense of it.
However, once I got back and had a look at the tracking, despite the SPOT's indicators being all over the place the track of the route was pretty good. So while I remain confused I'm currently reasonably happy with it. I remain certain that when this unit needs replacing I'll be going for the basic SPOT or something else though.