SpiderTracks ?

[Kulwin Park]

After reading the thread about the Aircraft Missing Enroute to Mildura http://www.pprune.org/dg-p-general-aviation-questions/486648-aircraft-missing-en-route-mildura.html , it mentions the Spidertracks as a location device. As to not takeover that thread, does anyone have any experience in using the Spidertracks?

I understand it works that a ground based person or company can follow your aircraft movements, as long as power is to it. What happens if the aircraft crashes, and power is cut-off to the unit, does the unit give the last known position, or does it not appear on anyone's screen?

Cheers, KP :8

PS - can it be tracked from a mobile phone, so that you know when a fleet aircraft is arriving without having to be stuck behind a desk?

[185skywagon]

We are using spiders for our aircraft.
It is a good system.
You can set it up to txt or email anyone that you have started moving or have stopped. You can set the reporting time intervals.
We have it up on one computer in the office anytime our aircraft are operating.
We can access it on smartphones.
If an event happened, the search radius is reduced to a 2-5 minutes flying from the last received position.

[Hasselhof]

From a practical perspective anyone with the login can see a plot of where the aircraft has been at regular intervals overlayed on google maps. If you have multiple aircraft it can plot all or some of the different aircraft in your fleet.

Basically

Aircraft power applied - spidertracks warms up, gets gps position and sends first position report to their server

Takeoff - either by the pilot pressing a button or automatically once the device detects a G/S over a specified limit it sends position report to the server and identifies that the aircraft is airborne

At regular intervals, say 10 mins apart it sends the GPS lat / long, time, g/s, heading and altitude info the the server

Landing - either by the pilot pressing a button or automatically once the device detects a G/S below a specified limit it sends a position report to the server and identifies the aircraft has landed.

It also has emergency modes that can be selected by the pilot that starts sending position reports at a much shorter interval (ie 1 min or something like that) as well as sending a warning message to the server which then will send an sms and/or e-mail to person/s specified by you that the pilot has activated the emergency mode of the system.

There is also an urgency mode that is similar to the emergency mode.

All of this info is logged on the server permanently and can be reviewed at a later date - it doesn't automatically get deleted.

Also there is an iphone app which allows a user with the login credentials to see which aircraft have an active unit and the movements of the current flight.

The spot messenger works in a similar way, however it really is oriented towards individual users and not in a flying situation. It is however much cheaper and IMO worth it if you do long distance remote driving outside of mobile phone coverage (at ground level that is pretty much all of the GAFA).

[NZFlyingKiwi]

We use it in most of our aircraft, it's a great system - had a few false alerts when it was first installed with people forgetting to deactivate it after their flight, but now that everyone's a bit more familiar with it, it's proving to be a helpful system.

It really does have one big advantage over the ELT, in that as the original reply mentioned, it constantly tracks your position so even if the unit is completely destroyed in a crash, or in an area where radio reception may not be great, you still get a pretty good indication of the aircraft's last known position.

It also has a "mark" function which allows you to put a marker on a point of interest which you can then review on the website after the flight - very useful for keeping track of good potential forced landing sites and so forth!

[27/09]

Spidertracks is very good however IMO Spot is very nearly as good at a fraction of the price. Spot provides real time tracking and a "911" function to provide an immediate alert to a predetermined phone number.

[Oktas8]

It's worth adding a couple of points.

If the power is abruptly removed from the Spidertracks unit without the correct shutdown sequence, the ST servers can be set to automatically send an alert.

It is also possible for the pilot to press an emergency-only button to generate an instant alert.

In case it's not obvious from the previous posts, Spidertracks uses satellite phone technology so is not dependent on cellphone infrastructure to send its messages.

[Ultralights]

Spot Messenger is the way to go, far cheaper, easier to use, and can be used as a satellite SMS service as well.