Originally Posted By: celler
They should allow you to upload your trip plan to their website which would only be accessed upon emergency activation and given to SAR.


I understand your intent here. But think of the minefields the SPOT company would face: data storage space, backups of that space, the ENORMOUS privacy risk if that personal data got compromised, etc etc. If I were them, I wouldn't want to add those layers to an already risky business model.

Quote:
they should establish some type of emergency fail safe that sends out an email to people on your list with your trip plan if you do not disable it by a preset time


Good news: you can implement such a plan yourself. I do it for every trip. My trusted group of contacts (plural!) gets an encrypted PDF file of my personal info, itinerary, and topo map of the area I'll be in. I use Nat Geo Topo for my trips and its easy to paste a JPG of the map into my itinerary document. I use an Excel spreadsheet I made for the itinerary document because it's so easy to tweak to suit, and insert pics. I "print" it to a PDF file for distribution to my contacts.

All SPOT-2 functions aside, my contacts know to call the cavalry if I don't contact them by an agreed upon date/time. So even if my SPOT fails entirely, or for some reason I can't access it, my contacts will provide SAR with a ton of relevant info.

I won't say it's failSAFE, but it's reasonably fail-resistant.