About SPOT Trip Manager

How do I activate the email interface?
How do I activate the Fire Eagle interface?

After setting up your account, you need to activate one or more location interfaces. For more information, start here: How do I get location data into STM?

There are two interfaces for getting location data into STM - email and Yahoo! Fire Eagle (FE). Email is the simplest interface and is the mechanism for importing OK and Help messages. FE is slightly more complicated, but is the only mechanism for importing OK and tracking messages. Help messages are NOT imported via FE because an FE location isn't tagged with origination information indicating the type of message sent to SPOT. My recommendation is to activate both the email and FE interfaces as they complement each other and provide a bit of redundancy.

For more information on setting up these interfaces, see:

How do I activate the email interface?
How do I activate the Fire Eagle interface?

Email is the simplest interface and is the mechanism for importing OK and Help messages into STM. To activate this interface, you need to make some changes to your SPOT Inc account:

1. Add the following email address to the distribution list for the OK and Help messages:
   
   Hidden to reduce spam. Please login into STM to see this address.
   
   
2. Be sure and click the Save button at the top or bottom of the page.
3. Ensure you've properly set your country and time zone in your SPOT profile. This will dictate the timestamp assigned to each message. After logging in to your SPOT, Inc. account, click on the Account tab and then click on the preferences link. Set your country and time zone accordingly and then click the Update button.

For more information, see the official Yahoo! Fire Eagle website.

What this means for STM users is that, once activated, STM will be able to pull your SPOT tracking messages in addition to the OK/Help messages. The FE locations are like any other and will automatically appear in the trips you create and the location pages you join.

1. Visit the Fire Eagle website and setup an account.
2. Login to your SPOT account and configure SPOT to share your location information with Fire Eagle. To do this, go to your SPOT account and login. Now click the Share tab and follow the instructions to enable SPOT to update Fire Eagle with your location.
3. Now login to STM.
4. Click the My Profile link and ensure your GMT offset is set correctly. This value is used to adjust the timestamp of FE messages to your local timezone. Without this data, all FE message timestamps will be set to GMT.
5. Click the Fire Eagle link in the upper right menu.
6. Follow all directions on the page and be sure to allow STM to read your *exact* location from Fire Eagle.

            The OK message needs to be sent only once, in order to synchronize the
            SPOT unit with the GPS satellite system. After successful delivery of
            the first OK message, you can use the tracking function as often as you
            wish. However, if you use the SPOT unit 600 miles or more from the
            previous location, you will need to send another OK message to
            synchronize again.
            

After successful activation, STM will poll Fire Eagle every 10 minutes for location updates. This interval will ensure all SPOT tracking messages are pulled into STM.

Regarding trips specifically, each trip can be password protected and/or prevented from ever being displayed to the general public via search results like that performed on the STM home page. Between these two options, your privacy is in your hands.

The best way to protect your trips is to give each one a password and prevent it from being part of any search results.

Both of these options are set when updating a trip.

To download your trip in KML, login to STM and click the My Trips link. Find the trip and click the KML link in the Actions column.

To allow the general public to download your trip in KML, edit your trip and check the appropriate option. You can always remove this option, if needed.

When you delete a trip, the trip goes away along with the view statistics for the trip. Once the trip is deleted, there is no way to undo it. However, since the locations are never removed you can always create another trip with the same or similar date range.

The first step is to copy the embed HTML. To do this, click the "My Trips" link in the upper right corner of the page. Each trip listed on the page has an Embed Link text box. Click inside the text box to highlight the content. Copy the text to the clipboard by right-clicking the text and selecting Copy or press Control-C.

Now that you have the embed HTML copied to the clipboard, you can paste it into a webpage or blog post. Depending on the interface you're using to edit the webpage, ensure you paste the embed HTML as HTML rather than plain text. When you view the page, you will see the fully-functional map of your trip.

When you look at the HTML code, you will see a number of parameters whose values you can control. They are:

• id - You probably don't want to change this one. It's your trip's identifier. If you want to embed a different trip, copy that trip's embed HTML rather than trying to change this value. Of course, if you know what you're doing, go for it.
• width - This value controls the width of the map image itself. Valid values are between 200 and 1600 pixels. Note that the <iframe> element has a width parameter too whose value should probably be at least equal to the width of the map. I've found that the <iframe>'s width should be 20 pixels bigger than the map for the best results. You play with it, though. This value defaults to 400.
• height - This value controls the height of the map image itself. Valid values are between 200 and 1200 pixels. Note that the <iframe> element has a height parameter too whose value should probably be at least equal to the height of the map. I've found that the <iframe>'s height should be 20 pixels bigger than the map for the best results. Again, you play with it. This value defaults to 400.
• scale - When set to on, the default, the map will contain a scale control. When set to anything else or omitted altogether, the map will not contain a scale control.