Question from Mark Bundy:

Spidertracks: How much did the unit cost and how much is the service costing (per hour/month/whatever makes sense)

Hi Mark,

The unit in the aircraft costs $2000 the last time I checked with Luke McCarthy at spidertracks. I must say that it performed flawlessly on our trip even at 67 degrees north…this is where most of my other electronic gear had intermittent failures.

They charge you for usage depending on how frequently you have it report. Mine is set to every two minutes and it appears to be $3.00 per hour. You can set it to report every 4 minutes reducing your costs to $1.50 per hour.

I highly recommend the service. I wondered why the Air France plane that went down didn’t have something similar tracking them so they could have been found sooner. It works well even in the Atlantic regions where there is no radar coverage.

I do have one standing complaint with spidertracks, I have mentioned this to Luke on several occasions…but they don’t seem to address this annoying problem:

You set preferences on your site for what units of measurement to show like MPH instead of Meters/Second, or altitude in feet instead of meters. They don’t seem to care or be able to fix this problem.