SPOT Team Tracking

[Jeff Beckman]

I recently had a SAR colleague ask me about integrating the SPOT service with Mission Manager to track field teams.  I know next to nothing about SPOT, but after reading the Post Location API, I can't imagine it would be that hard to write a script to dump the data into a mission.  Does anyone know anything about how the SPOT service works?  Do they have an API that we could hook up to?

[Radishworks]

I don't know much about SPOT either, but its other devices like these the MM API is for.  You are correct it should be pretty easy to hook it up to MM.  It really depends on if the SPOT service has any sort of API, RSS, etc. that will allow an app to query its location and then feed it into MM. 

[Matt Jacobs]

Jeff,

You should be able to infer the basic request URL and response format from the code here (note I haven't tested this recently, it may have changed at some point): https://code.google.com/p/sarsoft/source/browse/trunk/sar/src/org/sarsoft/ops/service/location/SpotLocationEngine.java

First, this only works if you pay an extra $50/year or so for tracking.  I couldn't find a way to pull the standard check-in messages through an API; you'd have to sign up an automated email account for the check-in notifications on each device an go from there.  With tracking on it checks in every 20 minutes, but I ran into a large number of dropped check-in requests even in an urban environment.  So a lot of times you'd go 40 minutes between position reports - which, in my opinion, isn't frequent enough to be usefully integrated into a CP.

So I gave up, and that's why SPOT may have updated their API since I wrote the code.