You got your amateur radio operator licence Pirate? I'm KC2EBM though I have not been on the radio in a couple years (I've also never updated my addy from my parents house which is why its still a 2 instead of an 8 designation).
My buddy I've gone backpacking with had a Spot thingy on our last big trip. I think his was the old version and apparently there is a new version that works better. Problems we had was that it was limited in functionality, it could only send like 3 messages, ok, some sort of problem message, and 911. I forget exactly, I think you could customize one message, but not on the fly. But the main problem was there was no acknowledgement that your signal was sent and received. When we went for our 5 day trip we left our trip route and daily campsites marked on a trail map with my friends wife. The plan was that we would 'check in' twice a day to say we were ok, at lunch and at dinner. The problem was for two days in the middle that our signal never went out. We didnt know the Spot was not working and our signal was not going out. And we didnt discuss with his wife what to do if we simply didnt check in. Luckily, the second day that our signal was not received, that evening my buddy was on his 2-meter radio and was talking to a fellow ham on a repeater we could hit. The other ham relayed a message over the phone to my buddies wife for us(we had no cell service in the mountains) stating we were doing well and on schedule. She said she was debating calling the forest service if she didnt hear from us that night, so it was a good thing we happened to get on the ham radio that evening.
I've heard there is a newer version, not sure if it fixed some of these issues or not.
