GPS Tracking ROI

Here’s a few links, tools, comments and tidbits I found interesting this past week … I see a lot happening in the GPS train world this coming year … if you aren’t onboard already, get on the train.

Tim Flight at GPSReview,net has an interesting and very useful post about reading the satellite information screens on many popular GPS navigation units.  GPS is never more accurate than the location and geometry of the satellites let it be, so this is a good learning tool.

GPS Insight has released an interesting map book tool into the ‘wild’.  Many people with delivery, service, taxi or emergency service vehicles operate with map books in the vehicles … a paper map book is still one of the most practical tools to help a driver find a location.  So how to tell a driver which page and area on the map book page shows the address of interest?  GPS and GPS Insight to the rescue … pretty darn useful tool.

Things I’m not really sure are worth it department.  In August, 2007, I included kudos to Lock-Mart, their contract partners and the government team involved in a flawless upgrade of the GPS Control Segment at Schriever (formerly Falcon) AFB, Colorado.  A great deal of this upgrade was long overdo, but let’s not forget that this is not as complex an installation as some might think … the gist of GPS Control is, the Ground Segment monitor stations send signals back to Control, computers in the Control segment parse data for necessary corrections and the Control Segment uploads corrections.commands to the ‘birds’ … the Space Segment.  Do we really need all this replaced yet again?  Not sure, since I am no longer part of the program, if this is great news or yet another testimony to the power of lobbying.

Unlike about 98% of my fellow Americans, I’m proud that I have had a life-long connection with agriculture.  I’ve even been a Colorado cattle owner and had cowshit on my boots and fixed fences that bordered on Falcon AFB..  So if the agricultural community is happy with this turn of events, I wish them well.  I do, however, want to go on record that I think spending money that would go directly to promoting agriculture is, instead, diverted to funding one of the greatest jingoistic political boondoggles known to man, is stupid, wrong, and uncaring of all the people in this world who aren’t as fat as Frenchmen, Germans and even us Americans.  GPS certainly helps agriculture and will help even more in the future.  Funding a competitor system that does exactly the same thing just because there’s an EU logo on the side rather than a Stars and Stripes strikes me as being very sad.

I’ll be back next week and this time I won’t be so afraid to speak my mind.  Peace.