The easiest way to explain how they remain up in orbit without crashing back down to earth is using ‘the ball analogy’. If a ball is thrown up into the air, gravity causes it to eventually return back down. The force of gravity is what keeps everything, and everyone planted firmly on the ground, keeping us from floating up into space.
Getting into Orbit
Satellites are launched into spaces orbit by rockets travelling over 40,000km per hour. At these speeds the rocket launching the satellite is able to power through the gravitational forces and break through Earths atmosphere into space.
Once the satellite is positioned correctly into it’s spot above earth, it will detach from the rocket and begin its orbit, using the energy known as momentum to keep itself moving.
How does the satellite remain in Orbit
Satellites are able to remain in orbit without drifting off into outer space by the forces of gravity. When a satellite is travelling thousands of kilometres away, the forces of Earths gravitational pull are still present, albiet not as strong as the closer you are to the planet.
They have the perfect balance between momentum and gravity to remain in orbit, a task in itself which is not easy.
The NOAA-20 satellite is in orbit a few hundred kilometres above Earth. To remain in orbit at that distance, it will need to travel at around 28,000km per hour.
In comparison, the NOAA GOES-East satellite is in orbit 35,000km above Earth, which means that it only has to travel around 10782km per hour to remain in orbit.
Conclusion
Momentum and gravity is what will keep satellites in orbit, and luck for us for us down here on Earth, satellites can remain up there for hundreds of years without us worrying about them crashing down on us.
The new Chinese GPS system is known in English as the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System.
BeiDou, The Big Dipper – The Chinese GPS System
BeiDou is named after the star asterism The Big Dipper, which in Chinese is Běidǒu
The US Monopoly
The United States (US) has for decades has had a monopoly on GPS positioning, navigation and time based interval technology with its GPS (Global Positioning System) commonly known as NAVSTAR, a multitude of 24 satellites which is run by the US military that still today provides the main framework for location on a vast majority of devices around the globe.
GPS satellites in orbit.
GPS is essential to the economy
These technologies have become essential to the modern economies; it is not just a tool for the US military and their maneuvers like it once was.
Many governments around the globe have looked towards breaking the reliance on the US GPS system by creating their own constellation of satellites.
Governments such as those in Russia (GLONASS), the UK (GNSS), India (NavIC), China (BeiDou), Japan (QZSS) and the European Union (Galileo).
Reliance on US NAVSTAR
Some of these GPS systems do still rely on the US NAVSTAR GPS system, and have only a few satellites to supplement & increase the systems accuracy, as well as improve coverage.
BeiDou – The Chinese GPS System Investment
BeiDou is the investment into GPS that China has made. A completely independent satellite system which has been in the making for 20 years
For the duration of 20 years, China has launched close to 36 satellites costing a staggering $12 billion US dollars.
Chinese handset manufacturers have known about this for some years, with ample opportunity to develop their products around this new GPS system.
Currently, close to 70% of all Chinese mobile phones are able to process BeiDou GPS signals from the satellites, and there is plans to allow a GPS tracker for car to use them also.
According to the People’s Daily, as of Tuesday morning, June 23, 2020, the last BeiDou satellite in the constellation was launched into Earths orbit.
The Chinese GPS Plan
The BeiDou GPS system in it’s current form is now completed, which brings forward to Beijing new flexibility and strength for this technology which has become so critical.
Ultimately, GPS technologies are not always a game of rivalry — additional satellites, regardless of who they are launched by, can offer other GPS systems additional redundancy to all that use them. The real winners here are the handset manufacturers which now have greater options.
GPS Spoofing
Earlier in 2020, the administration of Trump introduced an order that would enforce agencies of the government to develop anti-spoofing GPS measures, protecting GPS systems from hackers, which could cause severe data breaches & even loss.
Conclusion
Given the amount of worldwide logistics and our day by day lives are constrained by these advancements, further global collaboration around ensuring these essential resources appears to be vital.
Since China now has its own completely working Chinese GPS system, they have the motivation to secure their infrastructure as much as the United States does, in order to keep on providing GPS to the highest expectations of dependability.
There are no Australian Federal Laws for surveillance and GPS tracker legality.
Just what are you the laws in Australia relating to GPS tracking?
However, most states have Statutes covering the use and restrictions of tracking devices; only Queensland and Tasmania do not have legislation.
Both New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory have formal statutes and it’s highly likely that the rest of Australia will follow suit, adopting similar measures.
Keeping this in mind for those operating nationally, read below for some advice on how you can comply and references to be able to do your own research.
Generally, the use of a GPS vehicle tracking device to track and record employees’ activities intentionally without their consent is a criminal offence.
Consent, express or implied, of all parties involved is a necessity to remain on side with the law.
The underlying theme with all the surveillance statutes that currently exist is to obtain consent from the employees that will be surveilled, prior to using gps tracking devices . This consent by employees can be express or implied.
Obtaining express consent is possible where the employee receives notification about the use of a gps tracking device. The employee will need to accept this in the form of an employee contract or through a new policy.
Implied consent may include passive acceptance. The employee is made aware about the use of a GPS tracking device but may not respond in acceptance. A vehicle that has a label outlining that it is being tracked may be suitable for the requirements of implied consent if the employee then proceeds to use the vehicle.
Requirements for Employee GPS Tracking Across Australian States
NSW GPS Tracker Legality Workplace Surveillance Act (Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory also similar)
2 weeks written notice will need to be provided before GPS tracking will start. Information such as type of surveillance, data collection methods and timeframe will need to be provided. Within this notice, the following must be stated:
The type of surveillance that will be carried out (GPS tracking)
The methods used to obtain this surveillance (via the installation of a GPS tracking device)
Commencement date of surveillance
Whether the surveillance will be indefinite or sporadically
If the period of surveillance will be for a limited time or ongoing
Visible signage stating that a device is being tracked.
Restrictions on the placement of the devices and use of data collected:Work surveillance only allowed when the employee is ‘at work’
Records of surveillance must not be shared or provided to any other parties unless the use is for, or related to business activities that are legitimate, subpoena to the police, or any potential threat that could result in violence.
A GPS tracking collar is becoming very popular with livestock, pets and now big cats in Africa, and other parts of the world.
The Internet of Things (IoT) presently offers complex methods of shielding untamed life: correspondence systems can cover wild places; sensors can screen creatures, people and hardware inside them in (close) constant, and control focuses can group different information streams, progressively with the guide of AI (ML) and man-made consciousness (AI), prompting opportune administration mediations.
Smart Parks is a Dutch/United Kingdom based social venture that gives innovation answers for natural life insurance, with an emphasis on cornerstone animal varieties that are fundamental to keeping up the decent variety and usefulness of environmental networks (dim frauds, model, or wildebeest in the Serengeti).
One of the newer pieces of technology that Smart Parks has taken on is a GPS tracking collar, to help monitor the movement, mating and migration cycles of big cats.
“We began three years prior taking things down a notch in Mkomazi, Tanzania where we were the first to put LoRa sensors inside the horn of a dark rhino,” Smart Parks prime supporter Laurens de Groot told ZDNet. “From that point forward, we have manufactured Smart Parks in Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Congo, India, Zambia, Namibia and the Netherlands. We are working with accomplices, for example, African Parks, Peace Parks, WWF and numerous others. We’ve additionally provided our sensor innovation to a few existing parks with their own LoRaWAN-foundation, for example, Hluhluwe Imfolozi in South Africa. Right now we have more than seventy rhinos and many different species under our Smart Parks oversight.”
In 2019, Smart Parks propelled the OpenCollar activity, a GPS tracking collar which means ‘to pull in and rouse skilled understudies, specialists, and educated preservationists to create following frameworks that are progressively adaptable and a superior fit for use on various creatures’. The main deliverable from this venture was the secluded OpenCollar Elephant Tracker (subtleties are accessible at opencollar.io, GitHub and WildLabs.net), which is as of now under test in Liwonde National Park, an African Parks hold in Malawi. The open-source equipment course may not suit all associations, be that as it may, so Smart Parks likewise sells a scope of gadgets, made in organization with item improvement pro IRNAS.
The most recent Smart Parks/OpenCollar venture includes LoRaWAN-based GPS collars fitted to lions and cheetahs, additionally in Liwonde. Utilizing LoRaWAN network for predator collars permits high-recurrence GPS following, alongside battery life estimated in years as opposed to months.
Liwonde National Park supervisor Craig Reid stated: “The new LoRa GPS transmitter neckline units, which feed into our Wide Area Network, have had various advantages – in addition to the fact that we get close to live time following, however this comes at a far lower cost than customary satellite GPS collars.
We see a future where we complete the change to this new innovation and can screen our need species precisely, dependably and for an extensive stretch of time in order to illuminate our law implementation and the board methodologies.”
The lightweight predator trackers can deal with cruel outside conditions and can be fitted to existing collars or furnished with belting and stabilizers, Smart Parks said. The trackers can be designed remotely and give nitty gritty notices on temperature, battery use and development (through an accelerometer).
This permits settings to be streamlined for specific species’ standards of conduct, guaranteeing that GPS situating is possibly endeavored when the tracker is reasonably arranged to determine an area from the satellites, which can forestall pointless battery channel.
The ‘minds’ behind these cutting edge trackers is the LR1110 LoRaWAN handset with GNSS and Wi-Fi from Semtech. On account of its low normal opportunity to a position fix (4.5s) and low normal force utilization (27μWh), a LR1110-based tracker offers more noteworthy setup adaptability and expanded battery life.
For instance, a huge warm blooded animal module could run for 100 months taking a position fix at regular intervals, or for two years with a 10-minute fix stretch. By examination, past age gadgets dependent on the U-Blox ZOE M8G module normally convey four-hourly fixes with only a year of battery life.
GPYes tracking collars modules can be minimized and lightweight enough to fit little warm blooded creatures and winged animals, while their quick position-fixing time permits them to adapt to practices that give discontinuous access to GPS signals. Animals that rise up out of thick vegetation or surface adrift just at times are instances of such conduct.
Brilliant Parks’ de Groot is sure about the job of IoT innovation in natural life preservation: “With the quickly advancing industry around the Internet of Things, we are currently likewise equipped for furnishing parks with the capacity to identify discharges utilizing acoustic sensors and perceive gatecrashers with savvy cameras that work with AI. It won’t be long until we can quantify creature wellbeing status remotely too.”
On AI and AI, de Groot says: “As we gather an ever increasing number of information, AI permits us to find progressively personal conduct standards, giving more situational mindfulness that prompts significant knowledge – where do I send my officers best? It likewise takes into consideration more innovation to be sent and work all the more productively. Savvy cameras that can break down on the gadget itself will altogether decrease the time between a poacher getting to a recreation center and the revelation of the interloper.”
Sometime later, inserts may supplant following collars, says de Groot: “A great deal of the untamed life park proprietors would truly like this as the current collars are not extremely charming on the eye and can be badly designed for the creatures. It’s our strategic get this going one day, yet it accompanies admonitions right now.”
Fleet Tracking in Sydney with the use of a GPS tracking device is becoming very popular.
GPYes – Sydney Harbour Fleet Management
The use of GPS is utilized to improve overview of your fleet, and reduce overall running costs by increasing operational efficiency.
GPS Trackers for Fleet Management
GPYes provides the best vehicle gps tracking system in Sydney, Australia. We can supply vast array of tracking devices that can be used on any vehicle or asset; they come as hard wired, battery and plug and play (portable without wiring).
By using a GPS tracking system you can save your businesses money by reducing insurance claims, theft, unauthorized vehicle usage, fuel usage, servicing costs and potentially even insurance premiums.
Sydney and NSW are both massive areas spread out over a large geographical distance, so keeping track of your vehicles becomes a nightmare. Because of this a GPS tracker is highly recommended for not only fleet managers, but business owners and even sole traders wanting to monitor their vehicles and have a tighter grip over their assets.
GPS Tracking on the Aussie East Coast
The East Coast and NSW has some of the best infrastructure in the country, so satellite tracking over the 3G & 4G mobile network system is a very feasible solution, as opposed to Bluetooth technology. It’s highly accurate, cheap and consistent unlike its BT and satellite GPS counterparts.
Monitor your vehicles always
GPYes GPS Tracking in Sydney will allow you to easily see exactly where all your vehicles are at any time which allows fleet management as efficient as possible, benefiting all stakeholders involved.
GPYes – Sydney area view of the City
Reports
Make use of detailed reports which will show statistics about trips taken, addresses stopped at, speed driven, speeding and engine hours.
Conclusion
All these features will allow you to be a better Fleet Manager in Sydney and save countless amounts of money for your business.
GPS tracking device benefits are plentiful & when owning your own business, or managing a fleet of vehicles you are always looking for ways to increase productivity, reduce costs, overheads and improve customer satisfaction.
You can do this in a variety of ways with a GPS Tracking Device. To see our top 5 benefits please read on below:
1. Reduce Customer Response Times
A faster reply to your customers is an easy way to increase repeat business, helping to strengthen relationships with your customers.
Having visibility over your fleet with an installed GPS Tracking Device means you can pick the right vehicle for an incoming job, by selecting whichever vehicle, or whomever is closest.
2. Increased accuracy in time sheets
Have you ever had an issue with a customer disputing time on a timesheet? Have you found it too hard to justify your hours, because you cant even remember them yourself?
Customers don’t like being overcharged, but when you have reports showing the hours your van was parked out the front of their house or job site, it’s hard to argue with the hours you’ve put in.
Not to mention the benefits when it comes to logging your vehicle usage hours with the tax department.
3. Reduce costly repairs
We all know that a proper service schedule increases the life and resell value of your vehicles, and improper usage of a vehicle reduces it’s life.
Having that visibility over your employees and how they are driving will give incentive for good behavior driving, increasing your vehicles life by reducing wear and tear.
4. Reduce theft and loss
When you use truck trackers you will instantly know if a truck has been stolen from a yard or overnight stop and be able to alert authorities if it has been stolen and provide the location to aid in recovery.
Don’t let him get you.
If your vehicle is stolen you can be alerted instantly by the inbuilt alarm system within your GPS vehicle tracking system. Receive an email or SMS to your phone when unwarranted usage occurs.
You can set up a gps geofence, such as a garage, or neighborhood block, and be notified when a vehicle exits.
These alerts will be sent to you instantly over the 4G network, as long as you have a 4G GPS tracker, and not one that works over the bluetooth network!
5. Decrease the cost of insurance
Insurance companies offer reduced costs as a discount as the chance to retrieve a stolen vehicle greatly increases with a gps tracking system.
When you are running a fleet of vehicles, this saving adds up to be a worthy amount of money.
Summary of GPS Tracking Device benefits
There are many more benefits to installing a GPS tracking device within your vehicle than just the 5 listed here.
In the course of recent years, GPS trackers have been utilized by many industries for a variety of reasons; from rentals, taxis, tradesmen like electricians & plumbers, fleet managers and business owners.
These arent the only services that can benefit from the cost reduction savings and productivity enhancements that GPS trackers have to offer.
One commonly overlooked vehicle is a bus. Busses that take our school students to their school, our university students around the city, our business men cross country, and travelers over ferries.
Once upon a time…
There was once a time when the only option was a hard wired gps tracking device requiring external atennas stuck to the front or back windshield; cumbersome gadgets with expensive month to month administration fees, wildly inaccurate positions, extremely slow cold TTFF, lackluster customer support teams and reports that hardly reported anything.
We have come a long way since then, and GPS trackers have advanced significantly.
No matter what bus you have, there is a gps tracking solution for you. The most common options would be as follows;
OBD Plug and Play
Magnetic
Battery
Hard Wired
School Bus GPS Tracking
Since the unfortunate transport crash in Chattanooga, USA that brought about the tragic passing of five kids, numerous guardians have been inquiring as to why more school busses haven’t been fitted with GPS Tracking Devices.
It’s a good question, considering how cheap and obtainable the technology is now, there really isnt any excuse to fitting your school bus out with a tracking device.
Had there been a GPS tracking device within that bus, it might have saved some lives.
School benefits
Schools would be set to benefit from a gps tracking device in the following ways:
Satisfying worried parents. Bus late back from school camp with a father freaking out? Not a problem.
Keep track of milage for tax purposes
Ensure the bus is only being used for school related tasks.
Why are they doing it? The main aim of using the tech to better monitor bus drivers, and provide the public with current, real time information on where buses are.
Bus location data is also fed back to ‘smart bus stops’ equipped with signage showing when the next bus will arrive. This is great for customer satisfaction and to help everything run smoothly.
Map overview of busses GPS tracked in Sydney CBD.
Conclusion
Whether you have a single bus, or a fleet of 1000, installing a bus gps tracker has its benefits with lowering cost, monitoring drivers and an increase in customer satisfaction.
To begin with, the basic definitions are GPS Global Positioning System & aGPS Assisted Global Positioning System. One is assisted, one isn’t.
We recommend you read about how gps works if you are unsure what GPS is.
How it is assisted
aGPS is assisted by the cellular network towers, which are always pulling & updating their GPS locations from orbiting satellites with their own built in GPS receivers.
With this cached location data, they can provide updates to aGPS enabled devices; such as phones, and some GPS Tracking Devices.
GPS is not assisted, so it relies on information pulled directly from satellites to provide location updates.
TTFF – Time To First Fix
Because GPS is pulling location updates directly from the orbiting satellites, rather than having a speedy helping hand from the cellular network, there can be delays if the orbiting satellites are not within close proximity, or line of sight.
The time in which it takes to lock onto multiple satellites to pinpoint where is called Time To First Fix, or commonly abbreviated as TTFF.
GPS TTFF can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes, depending on a variety of factors such as;
Current location
Location of satellites above
Interference caused by weather
Buildings, mountains or other signal wash out
Better line of sight = quicker TTFF
Benefits of aGPS over GPS
Apart from the above benefits of TTFF, being able to utilize the cellular network means that aGPS has the following benefits;
Obtaining satellite location data quicker (TTFF)
The device is using less processing power
Decrease in battery usage
Ability to obtain satellite location data indoors, where line of sight may not be optimal.
aGPS and GPS explained diagram
Benefits of GPS over aGPS
Whilst aGPS is faster in finding location data from satellites, GPS provides better accuracy. However, research has shown that the difference is negligible.
Another benefit of GPS is that there is no additional costs, unlike aGPS which will incur extra usage costs as mobile carriers consider it data usage.
Introducing the new and improved GPYes Tracket – a 4G GPS Tracker device which supports the 4G LTE network, as well as continued support for 3G.
As the 4G network bands change in each country, there will be 3 versions of the GPS Tracket that supports a range of bands.
The tracket will continue to function as a GPS OBD Tracking Device which plugs directly into your vehicles diagnostic port, negating the need for costly installation.
4G LTE SIM7500 chips models and supported bands.
SIM7500SA: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B7/B8/B28 – Latin America, Australia (e.g. Optus, Telsta, Vodafone)
SIM7500A: B2/B4/B12 for the USA (e.g. AT&T)
SIM7500E: B1/B3/B5/B7/B8/B20 for Europe, Asia (e.g. Vodafone)
The GPYes Tracket is a completely plug and play device which requires no wiring or configuration. It was designed with ease of use in mind for fleet managers, business owners and consumers as a turnkey tracking solution.
GPS Over 3G/4G
The Tracket will receive location data from the GPS network & send it to our GPS Tracking System, allowing real time tracking, as well as storing the co-ordinates for later retrieval.
The tracking system is software agnostic and can be viewed from any device
Some of the features of this 4G GPS Tracker device is as follows;
Supports a wide range of vehicles by plugging directly into your vehicles OBD
Zero Configuration, Zero wiring.
3G/4G Support (Many trackers sold in Australia are sold as 2G only. The 2G Network Shutdown occurred years ago.
If you manage your own business or businesses with a fleet of vehicles, you may be doing some research as to whether employing a GPS Tracking system is the right thing to do.
If you wish to reduce your costs and overheads, then it is highly recommended to install a system as soon as possible.
GPS Tracking systems have been known to not only pay for themselves over time, but offer a return on investment unrivaled by anything else.
A $5480 Experiment
A recent experiment by Motorola on the viability and cost savings of GPS tracking systems revealed that on average, $5480 was saved for each worker that had installed a GPS tracker.
A GPYes Tracking System will save your businesses spending in many ways; as well as promote safe driving and keeping your employees honest.
Decrease In Fuel Spending
Fuel is perhaps the greatest cost for a business with a workforce that is always on the road.
Fleet Tracking will allow you to lessen your fuel costs by taking out inefficient fuel exercises cause by poor employee driving behavior; harsh accelleration, speeding, sitting idle when it should be switched off & non work related drives.
Limit mileage by dispatching the closest vehicle to an incoming job, decrease dangerous and inefficient driving techniques, as well as the theft of fuel.
Slashed Insurance Premiums
Depending on your relationship with your insurance provider, and who they are, some will offer a reduction in yearly costs as well as premiums.
Having a GPS tracker will increase the chance of retrieval of a stolen vehicle, which insurance companies love.
It will also show that you are monitoring driver behavior, ensuring they are doing the right thing & not engaging in risky behavior.
Rid yourself of the logbooks
Logbooks and ATO reporting is tedious, employing a GPS tracking system helps you to keep records of where you & your employees have been, KM/milage driven & beginning/end trips.
Car maintenance costs reduced
Promoting better driver behavior works has a direct relationship with your vehicles servicing. Harsh driving increases wear on all parts of your vehicles engine & chassis, not to mention lowering the risk of a complete write off should the worst happen.
A safe driver is also a driver that is taking care of his vehicle.
Efficiency in driving routes
Having an eye over your entire fleet makes scheduling jobs a breeze, by picking the vehicle closest to an incoming job you can cut down on unnecessary driving from vehicles that may have been further away, increasing profitability by increasing billable hours.
Employees; Trust but Verify
GPS Trackers make your employees accountable, if they know they’re being tracked they are inclined to be doing the right thing by you.
You will be able to see if they are using their vehicle for non-company related reasons including side jobs or to help friends & family when they have not asked for permission to do so.
You can easily verify the times they have provided you with when they have arrived/left site. This particular part can be automated with gps geofencing and alerts.
No more unauthorized vehicle routes
Get a good deal on fuel and mileage by checking what course your workers use to get site to site. There might be a shorter or quicker approach to get between stops. This can likewise spare you in expenses of paying extra time to your workers, or improve productivity by permitting another stop or conveyance every day
Greater amount of Billable hours
GPS following permits you to produce precise representative time sheets and accurate invoices, which diminishes the chance of your employees putting down extra hours and customer complaints. On the off chance that unreasonable time is being taken at an assigned stop, you can be made aware of this to improve effectiveness and decrease cost over-runs.
So why do it?
With all of these potential cost savings for your business, the question is: Can you afford not to install GPS tracking?
