Had The Gps On The Bike At Customs This Week Handheld And Tomtom , Not The Slightest Bit Interested In It .

Yes, we established that it is not an issue years ago (read past posts in this thread). The topic has changed to GPS accuracy in Russia, so this thread is now in Navigation - Maps, Compass, GPS. A "travel advisory" in no-longer needed.

When Globalstar first announced the SPOT messenger (2007), Russian regulations limited civilian GPS receivers to 30m accuracy. That meant for SPOT to be legal in Russia, Globalstar had to degrade SPOT's performance in that country.

The Russian's weren't "jamming" GPS signals to force this restriction. Rather, manufacturers of compliant GPS receivers had to design their devices (e.g., code their firmwares) to abide by the regulation. Globalstar does a lot of business in Russia -- having three satellite ground station franchises there -- and would be sure to follow all of her regulations.

Although the 30m restriction has since been lifted, I think SPOT v1 devices would still run with degraded accuracy in Russia unless there has been a firmware update. I don't know if the newer SPOT 2 devices remain limited or not.

peekay, that's the answer then - we got there in the end.

Thanks for moving, Moderator.

Chris S

FYI: Chris, a member of this forum, is currently in Russia using his Spot tracker. Link here.

*edit: I have found that sometimes the page needs refreshing before it displays the Spot map.

I had a problem with garmin worldmap in russia, frequently it was up to 5 miles off and very hard to navigate with, but this is more down to Garmin than anything else. It used to be that GPS sold in the west also could only have limmited accuracy (50m I think) because of military concerns.