GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

Oct 26 2009

Racing in the Sahara

Category: Egypt,Google Earth,Miscellaneous,People Tracking,Running,TT-1900 — rdonat @ 7:57 am

I guess my assumption that they would have a destination (e.g. the Nile River which was 162 miles away from base camp) was invalid. In the past 2 days, my brother in law Keir has been on a race through the Sahara, but they are just running around a track with no real direction:

Running around the Sahara

They’ve only gone 16.6 miles away from base camp, although they will have finished up with 49 miles of racing by the end of today (probably a couple more hours).

Today is a 28 mile day and a half hour ago Keir had gone 21.1 miles, as the crow flies, with one hour updates, which understates mileage by probably 8%. This means he should be done in the next 2-3 hours hopefully.

Tracking Keir across the desert with GPS Insight GPS Tracking

I’ll keep putting tracks up on the blog for interested people (e.g. Keir’s relatives…).

Interesting to see this type of tracking though — it is not the typical “where’s my driver” stuff.

Rob.

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Oct 25 2009

Sat Tracking in Egypt – Keir has left the base camp

Category: Alerts,Egypt,Google Earth,Landmarks,People Tracking,Running,TT-1900 — rdonat @ 9:05 am

I was curious when Keir, my brother in law racing 162 miles across the desert, would get started today, so I put an alert on his tracking device and built a quick geofence around his “base camp.”

GPS Tracking Geofence around Egypt Base Camp

Then I created an alert to let me (and his wife/parents in law) know when he got moving in the morning (down to the hour — the device only transmits to the satellites every hour since it costs around $.25 per “ping” and it probably doesn’t matter much to us which exact route he takes through the God Forsaken Desert):

Geofence Alert for Keir's Satellite Tracking Device leaving Base Camp

Then I got the email (I didn’t send myself a text message since it would wake me up in the middle of the night):

It went off at 12:14 AM local time, and Egypt is 9 hours ahead of us so they must have started between 8 and 9 AM local time. Here’s the alert I received:

GPS Tracking alert

And a quick image of his trek so far — I think they do 26 miles a day (a marathon a day until they do 162 miles). He had done 19.7 miles so far today so far, and is averaging around 2.6 miles per hour. That means a couple more hours I would imagine.

Hiking across the Sahara Desert with GPS Insight satellite tracking

Makes me tired just thinking about it. Actually, I think I’ll go for a run this morning, but a lot shorter and a lot cooler than this one.

Rob.

Tags: GPS Tracking alerts, Sahara Race tracked with GPS Insight GPS Tracking, satellite tracking in Egypt

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Oct 24 2009

Racing the planet in Egypt — GPS Tracking a race across the Sahara

Category: Egypt,Google Earth,Miscellaneous,People Tracking,Running,TT-1900 — rdonat @ 8:02 pm

My brother in law Keir Oxley starts a 162 mile race across the Sahara tomorrow. (This is the same brother in law who almost got me killed scaling the wrong part of Camelback Mountain 15 years ago…)

Here are 2 pics from the last race:

Egypt Race tracked by GPS Insight

He wanted to be able to “show” the family and friends his progress and asked for a tracking device. We have a perfect one for that, the TT-1900 (we don’t really advertise it much — it’s a tiny version of the TT-2000/2100).

He needed it light, battery operated, and satellite capable.

We programmed one up for 1 hour updates, and sent it to him.

I gave them a login & password, but didn’t want everyone in the world using it, so I also created (using “customer sites“) the following link: http://www.gpsinsight.com/egypt — it took 1 minute.

For iPhone & Google Mobile Map users, they can “search” and see Keir’s location by entering/refreshing http://gps-i.com/k/oxley/1778.kml

Anyway, this is a pretty interesting new use for GPS Insight devices. The TT-1900 is intended for container tracking and is waterproof, heat-proof (well, we’ll see how it works in the Sahara Desert…), and works on satellite networks across the world.

It only weighs 5.9 ounces so it won’t be difficult to lug 162 miles across the desert over 7 days. It’s rated to 212 degrees F & Keir said it was 122 today — 90 F to spare.

GPS Insight Satellite Tracking unit TT-1900

I’m guessing they’re hiking to the Nile river — it’s exactly 162 miles from where they are right now, & they start soon.

Hiking across half of Egypt being GPS tracked by GPS Insight

Keir is doing this A) to prove he can do it and B) to raise money for poor African schools — if you are interested in saving schools from being destroyed by elephants by helping to purchase a fence for them, feel free do so in Keir’s name here: http://www.asanteafrica.org/donate.html#online

If you feel compelled to buy GPS Tracking devices for your company based on your love for Keir & his cause, we’ll donate 10% to Asante Africa.

Have fun & be safe Keir!

Here is a link to Keir’s online blog from the race — they have an opportunity to use satellite internet to update this once a day.

Rob.

Tags: Racing the Planet, Satellite Tracking, Tracking With GPS across Egypt

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Mar 14 2009

New EZ-1000 gives me an excuse to go golfing…

Category: Arizona,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,People Tracking — rdonat @ 2:32 pm

I haven’t been out golfing for a LONG time — it’s busy here at GPS Insight.

But the head of marketing for a great local company we work with (bluemedia — www.bluemedia.com) invited a couple of us out to golf the other day.

So I got to enjoy the day on Wednesday & we played 27 holes.

But I needed to test accuracy and battery life on our new EZ-1000 so I put two of them in my pocket during the day. Here’s what they look like:

One was set for 15 second updates, sent every minute (blue), and one was simply set for every minute (orange).

You can see slightly more information on the blue track, and they are slightly more accurate since they are keeping constant GPS, but again, as I’ve mentioned, that drops the battery life down. We get about 20 hours at 15 second updates once a minute. We get around 40 hours by transmitting every 1 minute. The customer will have the ability to modify the settings “on the fly” so that the battery vs. information/accuracy tradeoff is in their hands.

This will be useful for foot patrols, dismounted police and security officers, and similar applications.

You can get a lot more information from this, such as we got off on time for our 7:36 tee time, and that I went to the water to try to get the ball I rolled into the pond on the 13th hole:

This shows my vehicle parked at the golf course for 9:45 (I didn’t get a lot of work done that day…):

But this is more telling of what activity occurred there:

We are going to start encouraging our customers to consider this product in addition to vehicle tracking, particularly if their drivers need to spend extended periods of time outside of the vehicle. They will double as a panic alarm, since they have a button for this on the side.

For more information on the EZ-1000 give us a call, or look on the website and in the blog under articles in the category “hardware EZ-1000″ — for a picture check out this article here.

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