Vehicle Tracking

Satellite Vehicle Tracking

The benefits to using a satellite vehicle tracking device in your vehicle are many.

Since these systems came into widespread use, there have been many cases where drivers on a lonely road, have lost control and fallen into a ditch, where they could not be seen by other vehicles passing. In pre GPS days, the driver may have lain trapped in their car for hours and days till they were found. And maybe too late. In the event, that the driver's absence was observed, and a search would be mounted. This could involve hundreds of man hours, helicopters in the sky, cars and ATV's scouring the sometimes forbidding countryside, often in the worst of weather conditions.

Now in the era of GPS satellite vehicle tracking, any vehicle fitted with a GPS compatible transmitter can be traced, and sometimes in a matter of minutes.

So what is the story that lays behind this breakthrough GPS technology?

Global Positioning System (GPS) describes a constellation of Earth-orbiting satellites that the U.S. Department for Defence had instigated the development around the mid 1980's as a military navigation system. Upon completion of implementing the project in the mid 1990's, the Department realized that unless the project was opened up for commercial it would be under-utilized and very far away from being financially viable.

The system operates around 24 solar powered satellites, each circling the globe at around 20,000 kilometers per hour, making two complete rotations every day. The satellite's orbit is correlated in order that at any time, anywhere above the planet, there are at least four satellites "visible" in the sky. Vehicles operating a GPS satellite vehicle tracking receiver transmits a signal to the four visual satellites, calculates the distance to each and uses this information to analyze its own location.

• The location of at least three satellites above the receiver;
• The distance between the receivers and each of the three satellites

By analyzing high frequency, low-power radio signals from the GPS, the receiver calculates how far the signal has traveled, how long it took the signal to arrive and how much time it has taken to return. Once this calculation has been made, the GPS receiver can exhibit the latitude, longitude, altitude, and country grid to transmit the current position of the device and the vehicle that it is installed in.

Most GPS receivers install this collected data into map files stored in the memory of the device, making navigation much more user-friendly. Using maps stored in the receiver's memory or by connecting it to a computer that can hold more detailed maps in its memory, drivers can survey the detailed map of his area and navigate their journey using the receiver's latitude and longitude readouts. Along with this information the GPS receiver also provides valuable information like odometer, speedometer, time span and average speed of an installed GPS device. The information regarding the vehicle location, along with other vital information can be shared by any other computer linked to the system.

By displaying the exact location on a map grid, a standard GPS receiver allows rapid tracing in the event of any mishap. It can also trace a vehicles movement in the event that it has been stolen. Many occupants of a local chop shop were left scratching their heads in wonder by the rapid arrival of officers of law in the early days of GPS Vehicle tracking satellites. Now they have got a bit wiser, and are moving into newer and more honest occupations.