On Jul 17, 10:34 pm, Darryl Ramm wrote:
You want to end the guessing game and tell us where your SPOT
messenger is mounted? On your harness? On your shoulder? Obstructed
by your head? What is the effective field of view of the antenna?

You were tracking roughly the same heading for all that time. And
that heading (very) roughly lines up with one of the inclined planes
of the GlobalStar constellation.

Darryl,

My SPOT is mounted in an indent in my glare shield (which is radio
transparent) well forward, and is oriented horizontally. While it
loses a little bit of the horizon to the rear (carbon fiber turtle
deck), it's a pretty good location. More to the point, as to why I
asked if anyone else had problems on that day in that locality, I've
NEVER seen more than two (maybe three, my memory isn't as good as it
used to be) dropped messages and here it was eight. Assuming rough
independence between dropped messages, that kind of jump (from 2 or 3
to 8 occurrences) would be highly unlikely. That's why I wondered what
happened.

While your theory about my track being fairly constant and possibly
aligned badly with the satellites is a possibility, I've never had
that problem before and whenever I fly from Hayward to the Tahoe area
I fly a roughly similar track. There's almost never any lift on that
part of the flight, so I fly pretty much direct.

Since no one else mentioned a big gap that day, I'm assuming the
problem was unique to me. One thing that came out of this: I've told
my wife not to look at the SPOT track to watch my progress. A huge gap
like that looks too much like a ship gone down.

Martin