Utah Windriders Association

I bought a Spot and Delorme PN-60 GPS combo. The cost for the hardware and service is ridiculous, but I could not resist the idea of sending text messages from Strawberry or Skyline saying that the wind is on. I am going to give it a try today and send a message (hopefully) to Twitter. I set up an account called kennysnowkite on Twitter. Hopefully, the costs will go down and in a couple years we can get johnny on the spot reports from most of our crew.

Kenny,

Does the record message function of the Windtalker work? It seems like that could work similarly and is woefully underused.

I have been told that I have more money than cents (or is that sense). So, that might be a good investment. Can I ask how much you spent for everything and what services you got?

Fredish,

I have been told that I have more money than cents (or is that sense).

I resemble that remark.


DeLorme has a special right now $459 for GPS and Spot. The basic service is $99 per year + $29 for 100 texts or $49 for 500 texts.

BTW, I tried it today and it worked! Check out "kennysnowkite" at Twitter.

Kenny,
So I got myself a twitter account because of this post but noticed you didn't post anything about Strawberry to it yesterday (12/23), (unless I don't know how to use twitter which is entirely possible!) You realize we're all going to be expecting you to give us real time postings of where we can go for wind now!

-Ken
P.S. We all really do appreciate your time and dedication helping us out with wind reports and other things. Keep up the great work.

ChrisPSherwin wrote:Kenny,

Does the record message function of the Windtalker work? It seems like that could work similarly and is woefully underused.

Chris,

No it does not work right now... And, you're right, has been under-used in the past in my opinion. People have trouble leaving their voice reports once they see the whitecaps along with the social fear of "being on stage", leaving a voice message in a public forum. etc.

The windtalker line is not working because the company that used to offer the free phone line is not offering it anymore. We're looking into options.

Kenny,

This looks interesting... I am a total Twitter rookie, thank heavens... Can we have a UWA Twitter account? Don't Tweets work with SMS Text messaging? And can't you get Tweets texted to you? So you really would only need a cell phone with text messaging to recieve on site reports, if this is the case... I think however, that I'm wrong.