MarkHawke7 wrote:
All,
So in some of the recent discussions with SPOT about their upcoming
products, they tell me that they have indeed surveyed their users
about whether they would like to have altitude outputted. They have
not (yet) told me how much extra it would have cost, but they said
that the majority of users they surveyed were not willing to pay any
extra to have altitude outputted by their devices. They said that
while the "hangliders" have been passionate about it, that there
hasn't been a large enough group of users who said they were willing
to pay an additional amount to justify the additional bandwidth
usage.

A few months ago, I answered a survey from SPOT that had several
specific questions about altitude information and the additional price
I'd be willing to pay. I think I said something like $25/year.

Glider pilots, maybe balloon pilots, live on altitude, but I can't
imagine ground-based users having the slightest interest in altitude,
and I doubt airplane pilots care much, either, since they tend to fly at
constant altitudes. Perhaps they could offer to replace OK message with
the altitude, and do it without extra charge, since it would not be
adding any extra bits to the message. You'd have to press the OK button
every now and then, of course.

Eric Greenwell