Whatever your industry you drive your truck for, if you work for a bigger company the chances are you either already have some kind of GPS tracker in your truck or will do in the near future.  As well as enabling products like trucker app and helping navigate more sophisticated GPS devices help companies know exactly where there trucks are and when deliveries can be expected as well as if there may be a problem.  If you’ve ever wondered exactly how this technology works here is a brief over view curtsy of the GPS tracker company Remote Asset Management.

GPS stands for Global Positioning System and can be used to track an individual or vehicle anywhere in the world.  As with many technologies building an operating GPS is becoming much cheaper and as a result finding its way into a wide range of different gadgets.
 
Many cars, smart phones and cameras now come with GPS as standard but how exactly does GPS work.  GPS relies on satellites, there are currently 27 satellites orbiting the earth specifically for navigation services such as GPS.  24 of these are in constant operational use for navigation and the remaining 3 are there as back ups should any of the first 24 satellites become damaged or face difficulties. 

Each of these satellites each weighs between 3000 and 4000 pounds and circle the earth twice daily.  A GPS devices such as those found in many trucks search the sky for signals being broadcast by the satellites, when it has found several signals it is able to triangulate almost exact coordinates of your position by assessing the distance it is from each satellite according to the time it takes for the satellites signal to reach it.  The GPS then uses the speed at which this information changes to work out both the velocity the GPS is travelling at and the historic location of the GPS.

There are two kinds of tracking devices, active trackers and passive trackers; passive trackers simply store the data in internal memory to allow the route taken to be viewed later when plugged into a computer.  These can be used prove exactly where your truck was and when.  Active trackers are more sophisticated in that they constantly update a central tracking system of the trucks location.  These are used to help customers see exactly where the goods your delivering are and predict when they are likely to arrive, they also allow employers to know exactly where there vehicles are at all times.

The integration of GPS devices into smart phones means that owning a GPS is becoming increasingly more common and leading to the development of applications like trucker app that depend on the mobile device knowing your exact location.  Although now more accurate locating people by there phone is not a new technology, since the invention of the mobile phone it has been possible to track a person by there phone by looking at how close the phone is to the surrounding mobile phone masts.

These kinds of devices are only likely to increase the trucking industries depends on Global Positioning Systems.