Keep on Tracking

Tracking cars has become essential for many companies. Whether it’s for busses, sales reps, delivery vans or taxis, logistics personnel need to know where their staffs are.

Since the global positioning system was released for accurate civilian use in 2000, the GPS business has made huge strides and is continually added to with newer satellites and is now becoming more accurate and faster with the addition of the Galileo network in Europe and the Beidou system for China. This level of global navigation will allow users to get even faster positioning information wherever they use their GPS device. But for tracking it offers even more possibilities and now taxi firms are taking advantage of the possibilities by combining tracking technology with cellphone applications.

Tracking technology works by combining GPS technology with wireless communication. GPS, for all its brilliance, is fairly ‘dumb’. The receiver sends and receives signals to a base station which triangulates signals with satellites to give a position. But all this is done through fairly complex maths algorithms, which is after all what CPUs are good at. But what they can’t do is send this data anywhere. This is where the wireless communication bit comes in.

By installing a SIM card into the GPS unit, the location data of the car can be sent to a central database where the information is sent onto display panels for the control center staff to watch or it is compiled into the application (app) server where cellphone users can collect it.

Through the use of this app, mobile phone users can order their taxi directly and pay for it online and since a specific cab is assigned to them they can be sent updated information as to its estimated time of arrival.

As soon as the customer orders a car, the driver is sent a message via his onboard terminal and in some cases it will automatically send the location details to the GPS so they know exactly where to go, because let’s face it not all taxi drivers take The Knowledge and quite often don’t know where to go.

Now taxi ordering apps are becoming global and despite some legal hiccups they are changing the way we order cabs and mean that we no longer have to wait with uninformed anticipation for a delayed car.