If the data is older than one hour the icon is an orange dot with
the registration in black.
The flight following system combines the tracking information from several trackers and displays it on one screen.
The top of the screen has the site selection drop down menu and the page selection menu across the top.
The site map page shows the most recent location of the trackers that
have location data in the last twelve hours. If the data is less than
an hour old, the icon is a green dot with the registration in black.
If the data is older than one hour the icon is an orange dot with
the registration in black.
If the two most recent locations reported are within one hundred meters,
that is taken as a stationary tracker. If the most recent location
is more than two kilometes from the site the icon is a solid red dot
with the registration in black.
The orginal Spot tracker only sends a track point once, but the Spot 2 and 3 send the three most recent locations each time a track update is sent. Occasionally when the GPS loses location data the Spot will send the last point with a new timestamp, causing several location reports from the same location with a different time. This causes spurious red dots from the newer Spots. To check a track point to see if it is from a newer Spot, click on the icon and look at the infobox. It will have the ESN. An ESN starting with 0-7 is an original Spot. Later models started with 0-8.
The Spot 3 has motion detection and doesn't continue to send track points when it is stationary. This can cause the tracking system to not notice that the Spot is stationary. If you're worried about this, when you land out press the Help button. This will send a message every five minutes and should trigger the solid red dot on the tracking display.
Each icon is clickable and pops up an info box with more data. It also has a link to the track page for that individual tracker.
The site map should automatically scale to show all the active trackers registered to the site.
The database page has a list of all the trackers registered to the site. Tracker registration information can be added or edited.
When adding a tracker, it is important to get the ESN correct. The ESN is the key and cannot be edited. All the other information can be altered, but the only change that can be made to the ESN is to delete the record and start again.
When adding a InReach tracker, use the IMEI as the ESN. If the InReach is registered with trackme.nz you don't need a shared page entry.
The track page shows the track of an individual tracker on a day.
Normally this is accessed from the link in the icon info box
on the site map page.
The track points are numbered sequentially to show the direction of flight.
Track points are shown with a green ring normally,
but a red ring if within
100 meters of the previous point.
The icons are clickable and will pop up an infobox with the time of the trackpoint, location, distance from the site, and a link for driving directions.
Spot trackers registered with findmespot.com and using tracking must have a public shared page set up so that the tracking points can be collected from findmespot.com and displayed on the tracking page. The public shared page URL must be entered into the database.
Spot trackers (and InReach trackers) registered with trackme.nz do not use polling, so do not need a shared page in the database.
InReach trackers registered with inreach.garmin.com are supported, but you will need to email philplane35@gmail.com with details for manual setup.
The polling page allows the selection of which trackers are to be polled for data. Once selected polling occurs every 10 minutes. Polling continues for 12 hours and then stops. Polling is not continuous to avoid unnecessary load on the Spot server.
The landed page allows the selection of trackers which have landed and whose information should be suppressed to avoid cluttering the site map. Trackers can be landed and 'unlanded' any time. The tracker data (if any) is still being recorded, but isn't displayed on the site map page.
The active page lists the trackers that are currently returning data. They are shown in order of age (in minutes) so you can see at a glance which trackers are up to date. The message type is shown to help troubleshoot trackers.