GPS Tracking ROI

From the day we start school through most of our lives we are obsessed with scores and grades.  Did we pull a 4.0?  Did our favorite team make the playoffs?  The list goes on.  GPS tracking is no different.  Everyone wants to know how good it is, usually they aretlaking about the actual accuracy of the ositions calculated by the receivers and outage times … zero is best.

Obviously the system won’t attain absolute perfect accuracy.  The specs for unclassifuied civilian use say basiclaly plus or minus 10 meters.  But usually the system itself perfrmns a lot better thna that.

How much better? Well, the USAF, the operators of the system for the worls, spend alot of time documenting pastperformance and predicting the future.  Here’s a snap shot of a tool you cna use any time, from anywhere inthe world, to see how well the system is meeting its goals:

Just go to the USAF Offical site and you can update your expectations any time you wish.

On impressive thing to notice.  This chart is showing 2 to 4 meter accuracy for most of the populated world, most of the time.  that’s amost five times better thna the performance standard.  Not too shabby.  The US militray is pretty unpopular these days, especially in the US where they are just ‘client soldiers’ off in Iraq while the rest of the country grapples with the “real war”, trying to kepe up the ortgagepayments on the house the “iover bought’ to impress.  But you might givve a thought to the people who spend their days, nights, weekends and holidays making a military system work five times betetr than designed for all US citizens along with everyone else in the world.  My hat is off to them.

As my old friend Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith was famous for saying, “I love it when a plan comes together.”  This morning I spent a lot of time exploring the site of a company that basically does it all for customized GPS tracking that will exactly match up with your business needs.  The company is GPS Gate and I was so surprised to see a Google ad for them when this page opened.  great minds think alike, I guess

GPS Tracking Map

For years I have suffered both as a client and a solution provider from the exclusive proprietary-ness of almost all GPS equipment and service providers.  Here we have a free, world-wide totally ‘open sourced’ utility … the GPS itself, and open source specifications, such and the NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association) for typing off-the-shelf or custom-built components using the GPS together, and yet for years manufacturers have conspired to try to make access to the basic ‘guts’ of the system difficult or even impossible.

GPS gate is a company dedicated to selling software and hardware that not only works within the GPS but also works with other manufacturer’s equipment and software so that the user, and the customer GPS service provider comes out the winner.

We need more companies like this in order to move GPS tracking from the backwaters of the technocrats into the forefront of business management and increased business profit through GPS Tracking