SAFA Skysailor Magazine

19 January | February 2022 SKY SAILOR inReach themselves can communicate directly with your InReach. The feed link allows your inReach’s raw data to be fed into a tracking app such as XC Guide or sent to a tracking web site administrator. More on those later. The upshot is that, provided you have tracking switched on, people will be able to see where you are if you have given them the shared map page. Spot Spot have recently put a lot of work into their website and mapping interface, as well as introducing a tiered structure to their map presentations. So now, you pay for your service subscription plus a bit extra if you want more than the basic, free mapping options. Creating shared views is now performed from within the ‘Maps’ section of the website when you are logged into your account: Figure 3: Spot map interface On the left-hand edge are some buttons, one of them being the ‘Share’ symbol. Select that. A pop-up dialog box will appear on the map with a big, fat ‘ + ’ sign. Click the plus-sign and you will then be guided through the ‘Shared View’ creation process. At the end of that process, you end up with a ‘View’ link that you can share so anyone can see where you are when tracking is enabled; all they need to do is drop that link into the web address bar in a browser: You can also send a message to SpotX devices from the Map page – click on the cog symbol next to the device name, then select ‘Send Message’. To create a link to the data feed, you need to go through a different process. From the front page of your account when you log in, go to ‘Settings & Billings’, then select the ‘View/Edit’ button in the ‘XML Feed’ item. You’ll see this, though note that this image shows my feed already created: Figure 5: Spot create XML feed Hit the ‘Create XML Feed’ button, give your feed a name, select the options you want, and press ‘Create’. You will then see your created feed: Figure 6: Spot XML feed Figure 4: Spot view link created