Using GPS Tracking With General Transportation

It has happened to everyone at some point. You’re at the ballgame, the mall, or school. You park your car in the lot, attend the event, and walk back to the parking lot. You pull out your keys, look around, and ...

Where did you park?

At first, you’re embarrassed. How could you have forgotten where you parked? You regret buying a car that looks like every other car. You regret not placing one of those pink daisies on the top of your antenna to set your car apart (although, in the long run, having one of those might be more embarrassing than forgetting where you parked).

You admit your problem, and your friends have a laugh about your forgetfulness. Then someone suggests you press the panic button on your key. When the vehicle starts honking, you’ll find it easily, your friend says. You shrug your shoulders. Why not? It’ll be embarrassing, but you’ve already been humiliated. Things can’t be any worse, right?

You press the button, but nothing happens. No horns honk. No lights flash. You walk to a different part of the parking lot and try again, and again, and again. Nothing happens, and your friends stop laughing, because this situation really isn’t all that funny anymore.

Now comes the part that hasn’t happened to everyone at some point. Your vehicle appears to have disappeared. Somehow, while you were shopping or at the game, your car disappeared.

At least you aren’t as forgetful as you feared you were.

Now you need to follow two steps. First, you make sure that none of your friends are playing a practical joke on you. Second, you call the police station. After learning that your vehicle wasn’t been towed because of an illegal parking situation, you request an officer to visit your location, so you can file a police report for a stolen vehicle.

If you have a GPS tracking device in your vehicle or in the cell phone that you left in the vehicle, you can take a third step: Finding an Internet connection, so you can log into your GPS tracking service account and figure out exactly where your vehicle is, giving the police a chance to recover the car as quickly as possible.

Receiving the benefit from using a GPS tracking service with your vehicle isn’t limited to the rare occurrence where someone steals your vehicle from the mall parking lot. Businesses can track cargo in a tractor-trailer, for example. A governmental institution, such as a school district, can track its school buses, quickly finding one if it breaks down on the side of the road or is involved in an accident. A parent can keep track of his 16-year-old son’s driving habits, determining where the teenager is driving and even how fast he is going.

Making use of a GPS tracking service requires very little work on the part of the end user. Depending on the type of tracking you want to perform, you could pay anywhere from $20 to $100 per month.

Let’s look at how a GPS tracking service works, using the FindWhere service (www.findwhere.com) as an example. You can use either a GPS tracking device or a GPS-enabled mobile phone as the primary tracking hardware for the service. Within the GPS device, you’ll find a highly sensitive GPS chip, a cellular modem, a battery, and a processor that controls and measures many of the advanced tracking features. The GPS tracking device is small, making it easy to discreetly place in a vehicle. The GPS chip calculates the GPS tracking device’s location, using signals from GPS satellites. It then sends data about its location across a cellular network to the servers at FindWhere. The servers store the data, making it available to the subscriber.

With the tracking service enabled and the tracking device in place in the vehicle, you’re ready to look at the GPS tracking statistics. With a service such as FindWhere, you log into your account, and, depending on the features you’ve chosen to track, you can see a variety of information about the vehicles you’re tracking. You can view a time lapse of your vehicle’s location placed atop a map of the area. With certain situations, you even could choose to have real-time data sent to your cell phone. Keep in mind that when you sign up for a GPS tracking service, such as FindWhere, only those people with access to the account will be able to view the tracking data.

Think of a GPS tracking service as a peace-of-mind technology. Parents will appreciate the peace of mind that comes with being able to know where and how safely their children are driving. School districts that can track every school bus in the fleet will give the parents of their students the peace of mind that comes with knowing the district will have almost-instant notification of any problems with any bus. With the stories that you read almost every winter of a bus that slides into the ditch while traveling on icy, rural roads, leaving the driver and children stranded, the idea of having tracking capabilities for the buses is an appealing one for parents.

With a service such as FindWhere enabled, you’ll have one additional benefit. The next time you’re at the ballgame with your friends, and you can’t find your car after the game in the vast parking lot, just turn on your cell phone, open your account at the FindWhere Web site, and pinpoint your vehicle’s location. Once your friends have a look at the impressive technology you’re using, they won’t ridicule you any more about your forgetfulness, and you won’t have to be embarrassed.

You might even start forgetting where you parked your car on purpose.

For more information:
FindWhere, Inc.
(703) 444-6100
http://www.findwhere.com

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