GPS Tracking ROI

Wonder why I haven’t read more articles like this in US news sources?  If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d suspect a cover-up, but as the man said, “never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by ignorance”.  read the Xinhua article on why GPS doesn’t work here and then come back to see my conclusions.

 BEIJING, May 18 — A few weeks ago a man turned up at my front door, having been guided there by a GPS satellite navigation system on his dashboard. He was a bit surprised when I told him that the place he was looking for was 10 kilometers away.

    I was less surprised because I have been testing these potentially wonderful devices for nearly five years and have yet to come across a single one reliable enough to justify shelling out hundreds of dollars for something that is often less reliable than a map.

    One still marvels at a technology able to pinpoint your position and guide you to restaurants and hotels nearby - when it is working properly. I meet people who swear by them, though if you probe further they often encounter bugs such as being directed the wrong way down a one-way street or being given instructions on the motorway seconds after the turnoff has been passed….

In most cases what the writer is commenting on here is the “Urban Canyon” effect and other GPS inaccuracies caused or exacerbated by a poor view of the sky.  GPS (or any of its proposed substitutes like China’s own Compass system, the seriously flawed Galileo of the EU, Russia’s GLONASS, etc. must have a good view of the sky in order to produce even their basic specified accuracy.

If you are driving a lot on city streets, depressed highways, in and out of parking garages and under thick forest canopies GPS technology is going to be challenged.  To be sure you don’t wind up 10 km in the wrong direction (6 miles for the metrically “hard of thinking”), here are a few tips:

• Use a system with a separate antenna and mount it where it gets the best view of the sky possible.
• Use a system with an active, powered antenna rather than the cheap passive devices most manufacturers try to palm off as “good enough”.
• Use a system that includes WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) … WASS is another free US Government service that will increase accuracy astoundingly.
• Test and measure under your actual driving conditions before you invest.  A reputable dealer or manufacturer will allow you to test before you buy … if they won’t, you’ll get a better ROI by keeping your money in your pocket.

I wander too far afield on the technical side of things here I realize. Many folks come by just to learn about the technology in the simple sense of how it can help them. I started another blog at www.GPSBUS.com to focus on more on the technogeek aspects and I promise to try to be more beginner oriented here at the GPS Tracking main blog.

Why would a person even consider GPS tracking for their business vehicles, government fleet or even their family car? Here are the Top Five reasons:

1. Peter Drucker said it best many years ago. “You can’t menage what you can’t measure.” In years of selling and servicing these systems I have yet to find a manger look at his fleet for the first time and not say words like, “Why are they driving there”? It isn’t that your folks are always wrong … but it’s that the manager never really knws how little s/he really knows about what the fleet is doing on the road unless they are tracked.

2. You’ll improve safety. Even if accidents didn’t cost so much in terms of insurance premiums, repair costs, downtime and workman’s comp claims, they would still cost in human terms. A company I worked with with spent several million dollars equipping a huge fleet with GPS trackers. “Oh my, I could never afford a deal like that” you are probably thinking, but get this … they saved back the initial cost in less than a year … and continue to save, millions per year in safety-related cost avoidance.

3. You’ll improve the environment. Three of the most significant and easy to predict savings will be reduced speeding, fewer wasted miles driven and less idling. Not only do these three all cost you money, they all pollute needlessly… two benefits for the price of one.

4. You’ll do more business. Ever deal with a delivery company wo can only tell you, “It’s on the truck”? Frustrating, isn’t it? How many old customers can you please and retain and how many new customers can you win over by always knowing the who, what and most important,when the delivery or service tech will arrive?

5. You’ll sleep better. Running a business or even raising a teen isn’t easy. There are aspects of the game that will always be hard … and there will always be times when you hit the pillow at night but your eyes fly back open, wondering if you have done all you could. Winding up right back where we began, GPS can’t solve every problem … but it can identify and measure the problems you have, which is the very first step in solving them.

This post was submitted to Darren Rowse’s Top 5 Group Writing Project. You can follow the link to learn more about it if you’d like to improve your blog and your writing skills.

Thanks an a big tip of the blog hat to GizMag.com for breaking this news about DARPA initiative to provide an alternate/back-up navigation system for GPS. (They are the folks who actually invented the Internet, by the way, regardless of what Al Gore or Tim O’Reilly seem to think …I was there.)

 … The objective of the Robust Surface Navigation (RSN) program is to develop technologies that can exploit various “signals of opportunity” — electronic waves emanating from satellites, cell phone towers and even television transmission towers — to provide precise location and navigation information to ground troops when GPS signals are being electronically jammed or blocked by natural or man-made obstacles, such as foliage or buildings.

… or solar disturbances … remember reading here about solar flares and the solar max cycle just a week or so ago?

… “The challenge is to develop an integrated system that can use all available signals — not just GPS — to provide accurate navigation information through one small receiver, thereby eliminating the need for an expensive, fixed infrastructure,” said Bart Ferrell, Boeing Phantom Works program manager for Precision Navigation Programs.

The Boeing-led Robust Surface Navigation team is beginning its 15-month Phase 1 concept development contract.

The team includes ROSUM, NAVSYS and Shared Spectrum. “Leveraging the technical expertise and capabilities of this exceptionally strong team will help ensure the development of a very robust integrated system for surface navigation,” Ferrell said….

In simple terms what we, as a world people and a nation within that world is to make use of all the electromagnetic signals that we currently flood the atmosphere with.  If the signal from the GPS satellite constellation is blocked, intentionally turned off, or “messed with” by a bad guy, vehicles, ground troops and aircraft flying over the USA (or other populated countries) actually have more than enough sources of data to late their position.  The problem is, in today’s narrowly focused “data silo” scheme of government programs, even though the signals are available the potential user would need a box car full of receivers and analysis devices to get data from the sources that are already there.  Why not make use of what we already have?

The TV signal portion of the solution is an extremely good idea.  Broadcast television, unlike the cheap, opportunistically built cell phone system is quite robust.  It also puts out very strong signals and one other necessity many don’t think of … an extremely accurate timing signal.  High accuracy timing is the key to any navigation system and television has it.

 I’ve written about ROSUM and their innovative work with TV signal positioning here in the past as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I style myself as Mr. GPS and I am a fully certified GPS enthusiast (geek), but like any technology, I don’t believe in keeping all one’s eggs in the same basket. Not only is this idea smart, and long overdue, there will undoubtedly be a strong commercial fallout as the overall quality of navigation will increase, significantly.  Come back here to the GPS Tracking ROI (return on investment) blog for more news and views like this, and if you enjoyed this article, let me know with a comment, and email, a phone call, (see the about/contacts page above) or take the time to click on the Digg and/or del.icio.us and let others know.

Oldest GPS satellite being prepared for disposal

by Staff Sgt. Don Branum
50th Space Wing Public Affairs
3/17/2007 - SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AFNEWS) — The oldest operational satellite in the GPS constellation has broadcast its signal for more than 16 years, during which time that signal’s mission applications — and the people who make sure the signal is available — have changed dramatically…. Read the full Air Force Link story here:

I selected this as my lead today because I have been reading a lot of advice type articles and blog posts lately that keep telling me to be “positive”. I’ll agree that’s normally good advice and I also have to admit that some of my Galileo and other GPS copy-cat systems posts may have sounded negative. I apologize for the negative tone, let me re-state that I am sure, even more after this article, that Galileo is stupid. (how’s that,coach?) (more…)

Several times in the recent past I’ve mentioned the use of anonymous GPS Tracking data from highway vehicles to use as inputs to Intelligent Transportation Services (ITS) and other technology systems to aid the calculation and display of traffic flows. There are a number of methods used to measure traffic flow parameters and GPS Tracking is just coming into its own in this field.

Most systems rely on the classic inductive pavement loop sensors that operate like the illustration here. You’ve seen these thousands and thousands of times, perhaps without realizing it because they are used all over the world to control intelligent traffic light systems. As you roll up to your next red light, look down at the pavement as you come up to the “stop line” painted on the road surface. You can often see that the road has been slit and then filled in with some kind of sealant in a rectangular pattern. That’s the most common installation method for these sensors. Commonly they have only been used to tell the computer that controls the timing of the traffic signal about vehicles waiting in the lane for a green light. But they can also be aggregated into a traffic information system and give a world of information to traffic managers, planners and real-time controllers.

Like almost everything involving technology they have their pluses and minuses: (more…)

The GPS is a world-wide system … yes, that’s what the “G” stands for … Global. GPS was specified and built for one particular purpose … navigation. It can truly be used to locate one anywhere in the world, and no days even in space.

Somewhere in the early days of GPS a sub-industry developed for tracking the location of people or things using GPS to locate the assets and sending the location information back to the government, corporation or individual wanting knowledge of that location. However, the commonly used GPS Tracking term is really a misnomer. GPS doesn’t “track” anything. GPS enables someone or something to learn where it is and that information has to flow back to a user for practical real time (more correctly “near” real time) tracking to take place. For talking purposes, let’s call this link from the asset to the “owner” of the asset the “back haul”.

The GPS tracking market is saturated with a plethora of “black boxes” that use the cellular telephone network as the back haul. For some users this will work, but it only works when the asset is in range of the correct cellular system. The tracking can even be called “global”, provided your definition of “global” means being in cell phone range. If you are shipping, say, a container load of expensive, marketable HD plasma TVs from Taiwan to Texas one doesn’t have to be a communications engineer or geographer to know that huge segments of the journey will be out of cellular coverage areas, so this idea really doesn’t meet my idea of what “Global” should be.

Other GPS tracking solutions offer satellite service as the backhaul. They can give service over whole continents or even, if they use the right communications satellites, the true globe. There are several competing satellite systems that offer coverage over most of the populated globe, and a couple that truly send and receive communications anywhere on earth.

Here’s one that uses the Boeing-operated Iridium system. It’s nice stuff. The terminals are relatively small and in comparison to the cost of a container load of flat screens, it’s pretty cheap … and of course reusable.

The Iridium system has been covered here before … see here and here for a little background. So here’s a company that almost “gets” the global concept. Except for one little detail:

…The D2000M/MD addresses the needs of mobile asset managers including those working with large/small trucks, tractor-trailers, lone-workers, container ships and more. With its lightweight 2.2-pound form factor, it makes the most of limited storage space available on many transportation assets. Additionally, since its battery runs over 24 hours (my emphasis) in a single charge, users without access to electricity can still maintain constant communication with their dispatch offices…. Press release Here: Company Site Here:

Now I’m not knocking Blue Sky, I think they have a heck of a lot to offer. But although we can easily track the ship our mythical container of plasma screens might be on, we sure can’t track the container … not with a 24 hour battery life. Talking up and down to satellites takes power and not many companies have been able to solve that issue. Tomorrow we’ll look at one who has, and who ‘almost” has a global solution … hopefully by looking at some of these real-world examples you’ll be better able to separate fact from fiction.

Does this sound like your city?

“I’ve had numerous complaints with regard to buses not running according to bus schedules so I want to find out from transit just how efficiently and effectively it’s running,” he said.

“I think we should look at putting GPS systems on board to help determine whether buses are running on the correct route at the correct time.” (Alderman Andre Chabot)

And does this sound like the genuine bull puckey your transit administrators hand out when asked to justify their level of performance, keep the public (who pays their salary, after all) informed about their transit system?

Calgary Transit spokesman Ron Collins said bus routes are strictly monitored by supervisors to ensure buses are on schedule and all are in constant radio contact.  Full news item is here:

Well I’ve got news for Mr. Collins, and for Alderman Chabot, (who already knows), Calgary, you have a problem, and, like a great many cities you are just sweeping it under the rug.

Facts Of Life (like your mother never told you)

• Public transportation is a necessity in today’s energy deprived world.  A bus is about 40 times more efficient than a driver-only BMW in getting people to and from their work, shopping, doctor’s visits, etc.
• Poor people don’t have BMW’s to drive (and many handicapped people can’t drive anything).  Transportation managers typically have their own vehicles, drive when and how they please (often at city expense) and really don’t give a care about those “second class citizens” who don’t have a car.  Public transit is typically run as a necessary evil by governments and they make no secret of the fact they wish the need would go away.
• The only government officials who don’t want public transport disappear are those dedicated to waiting out their time to collect retirement from the taxpayers … at least that’s my opinion when it comes to cities like Calgary.
• Public Transport does now have to operate at a loss and it doesn’t have to be a necessary evil.  But it does have to be managed.  You can’t manage what you can’t measure and dubious statements which are just personal opinion about schedule adherence and service levels are just that … opinion.  You can’t run a bus line without knowing what your busses are doing.
• Attempting to manage driver performance by sending out supervisors to observe is not only downright dumb, it’s expensive.  Typically supervisors get paid more than drivers and the supervisor should either be performing true management level duties or s/he ought to be driving a bus.  “Spot” checks don’t accomplish much and if you keep a supervisor on the streets you are essentially paying an employee more than a driver to do a lot less work.  Logic, Jim?
• Keeping track of schedules via voice radio is dead wrong.  It costs a lot of money for equipment, it costs a lot of money in labor and the whole procedure is fraught with errors …drivers may give “optimistic” information about where they are and if a driver is lost … well then how the heck can you direct him/her via voice radio.

Here’s a sample of how Calgary Transit “cares” for their riders:

The complete map is here:

Pick a corner, any corner, and tell me how you would get to another location in the city?  The damn routes aren’t even shown … you have to look at what line passes a corner and then look in the little tags to see what other corners that bus route passes.  I mean, we could make a decent map but who cares, my BMW already has on-board GPS navigation.

Here’s a sample of what a city who gives a care could do:

Notice anything different?  yeah they not only show the routes they show the busses and rider’s, those woeful souls who aren’t clogging the freeways in their BMW’s can even see where the busses are.  And they can even tell when they should go out and wait for the bus.  What a concept.  See it live here:

So what will you accept from your city?  More sit on their hands, do it like we’ve always done?  Or visible, publicly accessible proof that your transit management is doing their part to earn their salaries?  As say here in the Philippines, ” ’sup to you”