HOW THEY WORK : “The Car Tracking GPS”

The GPS is a short form for “Global Positioning System” developed by the Americans (USA). Initially, it was designed for military and space technology. It was intended in guiding space ships in their travels to the outer space as well as missiles to their distant targets. That said and done, how does the whole system work? During its inception, it was more or less a NASA (the US National Space Agency); this evolved around the “Global Navigation Satellite System). It was intended to provide accurate and reliable positioning, navigation, and timing services to NASA in their space technology. These days, it has been released to civilian use worldwide though it remains an American system. In recent years, Europe has decided to develop its own parallel system that will be known as GALILEO (named after the historical Italian Astronomer). The GPS system comprises of a number of satellites orbiting the earth, these satellites constantly relay information to planet earth. In countries like South Africa or Kenya, many people have had their cars (motor vehicles) fitted with a form of GPS hidden system. This system keeps sending back its location to the base unit in the premises of the company that provides the tracking services as well as doing the actual vehicle tracking. Many Embassies and multinationals that own a fleet of vehicles that spend much of the time on the roads doing this and that logistical errand, such vehicles are fitted with a monitoring system that keeps track of the location of the vehicles. It is human for a driver to deviate from the established route and maybe use the vehicle for personal benefit. In order to avoid such, all vehicles are fitted with secret GPS units that are used for monitoring. The GPS device is normally fitted by experts of the service provider. Before the vehicle is fitted, its number plates are removed and the vehicle is disguised so that the fitter may not easily identify the vehicle lest he connives with the drivers of thieves. The GPS system, be it for fleet monitoring or theft recovery all operate in the same way, they keep sending signals to the various GPS satellites. Among the information sent are the coordinates of the current vehicle location in relation to the ground position. That way, the tracker is able to determine not only the current location but the direction in which it is moving and the likely destination. For example, if a reportedly missing vehicle is seen to be progressing north easterly, it might be assumed that, it could be heading for Tanzania or even Uganda, you could easily alert the security agencies a few kilometers ahead to stop the vehicle. In some cases, you could even determine the speed at which it is moving. A few years, in South Africa, there was a case of a stolen car that was tracked and was found to be moving at close to 600kph in a westerly direction. At first, the trackers were confused but then, the realized that, the vehicle could be inside a plane moving westwards. By contacting the Air Traffic controllers, they were able to trace which aircraft the vehicle was inside, the eventually tracked the vehicle to Windhoek, when the plane landed, Police was waiting and the vehicle was recovered, thanks to GPS. eddie@afrowebs.com