GPS Trackers Find Novel Applications 185
Pickens writes "Inexpensive GPS devices like the Zoombak (which costs just $200 plus $10 a month) have becomes so prevalent that some people are using them routinely to keep tabs on their most precious possessions. Kathy Besa has a Zoombak attached to the collar of her 5-year-old beagle, Buddy. If Buddy wanders more than 20 feet from the house, she gets a text message on her phone that says, 'Buddy has left the premises.' The small size made possible by chip advances over the last two or three years is enabling many novel uses of GPS tracking. An art collector in New York uses one when he transports million-dollar pieces, a home builder is putting them on expensive appliances to track them if they disappear from construction sites, a drug company is using them after millions of dollars in inventory turned up missing, and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves."
For civilians (Score:2, Interesting)
Insurance (Score:2, Interesting)
Old people (Score:1, Interesting)
I used to do this stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for what's left of a company that actually managed to go bust developing this stuff.
We faced several challenges with the technology. Power consumption gave us ulcers, as did mobile network coverage. This is a non-issue in the city, but just wait until you're out of town.
GPS wanders around enough from fix to fix, even with WAAS, that it can be tricky to compare fixes to detect movement, or to track movement of less than 50 meters. Oh, and the GPS needs to be able to hear satellite signals. Good luck on that.
Finally, once you have a fix back at your server, you need to make it meaningful to the user. They do not generally want a bare latitude and longitude. They want to know what street their car is on. When the parents want to know if the kids take the car too far from home, they want to enter a street address, not a latitude and longitude. This is harder to get right than it looks.
Favourite application: tracking sub-prime used cars so repo men can find them.
...laura
APRS leading the way (Score:4, Interesting)
But, I think a lot of people would willingly turn on such a feature (say, on a mobile phone with a GPS chip and a GPRS connection.
Re:Old people (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:APRS leading the way (Score:4, Interesting)
Ham radio alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
The advantage of using dumb old radios is that you can operate independent of any fixed infrastructure, so it's usable even where you don't have cell coverage.
Tracking something small like a dog (I've had inquiries about kangaroos, too) introduces the problem of antenna placement, though. APRS is typically used on the 2-meter band, which means a quarter-wave vertical antenna is half a meter long. I did once put a passive data logger on my cat [blogspot.com], and found that she roams a little more widely than I thought, but that doesn't really count.
The advantage of relatively low frequencies and high transmit power is that you can cover a radius of 20 miles from one mountaintop digipeater (equivalent to a cell site), and they're not difficult to make solar powered.
There's a nationwide digipeater network in the US, and most of Europe is covered as well, along with much of New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. I think there are at least two APRS-capable satellites on orbit too, though PCSAT-1 is dying. Internet gateways are all over the place, so you can map APRS stations online [aprs.fi], and not have to maintain any receive-side hardware of your own.
I'm constantly surprised by the applications people come up with for this stuff. The most recent I heard was someone with a cable TV company who found that he could drive around and transmit at low power every couple of seconds and use a receiver back at the headend to plot ingress leaks in the cable system.
Add to that the fact that you can do two-way text messaging, weather, and telemetry, and it's more than worth the hassle of taking a simple multiple-choice license exam. It's this sort of thing that's going to save ham radio (if anything can) - talking to people around the world just doesn't interest people as much these days, when it's so easy to do on the Internet or the phone.
Re:GPS bug detector? (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used a radar detector in a long time, because in my area they were using switched radar units. I had a better chance of visually spotting a speed trap than detecting it first. One thing I had observed though was, some of my radar detectors would have false alarms because of other radar detectors. Some of my friends and I had tested it, where we'd turn our units on and off to see who's would set off false alarms based on who's units. We concluded that yes, some units would make other units beep that there was a radar source present.
The same applied to some home alarms, and automatic doors. I had more false alarms than real detection, which was another good reason to stop using them.
Building a GPS receiver detector would be a bit trickier, because the designs are so varied. I would think the best way to detect one would be a wide radio spectrum analyzer, and a very careful examination of the object you think may have a tracker on it. I believe you'd be looking for the same or similar frequency as the GPS signal is, and you'd always have some signal from the satellites. A very directional antenna may help.
It was my understanding that every cell phone sold in the last few years had GPS capability for e911 service, although they may disable the GPS service for any user interfaces.
I found this page [vzw.com] which says Verizon Wireless has GPS service in all wireless voice devices, to assist 911 operators in finding a victim. I know this isn't exactly true though. My stepson had a medical emergency about a year ago in the car (see my journal). I called 911 from my Verizon Wireless phone. I knew what road I was on, but since I was in the middle of my trip, I wasn't absolutely sure what the last exit I passed was. I gave the road, direction of travel, side of the road I stopped on, and a close reference to the nearby exits. I gave it to them within a couple miles. I was on the side of an interstate, with clear view of the sky in all directions, and there hadn't been any clouds in the sky all day. You can't ask for better reception for GPS.
We waited 15 minutes, with no callback and no emergency vehicles showing up. I gave up, decided he was stable enough to transport, strapped him back in the car, and drove as fast as I could for help. There was one of the radar speed signs on the side of the road, which flashed 99 as I passed it. I was going for help, and would have been satisfied to get pulled over.
I found a deputy with a DUI pulled over, and he helped us. He called for an ambulance, and apparently emergency ops didn't know where we were. No one had been dispatched.
Re:Insurance (Score:3, Interesting)