Auto Navigation GPS

If you’re actually an important person in real life, the Spark Nano GPS Tracker looks like a pretty cool doodad to keep in the pockets of your very-expensive pants. It’s basically a $200 panic button that alerts your friends and family that you’ve been kidnapped and/or marooned on an island somewhere.

Per the product description:

“The Spark Nano GPS Tracker with panic button is one of the smallest, most lightweight GPS Trackers available on the market today. Pressing the panic button sends an instant distress alert to family or friends pinpointing your exact GPS location. It’s the only device that can measure altitude and track for a continuous 5 days on a single battery charge. You can even choose to upgrade to a 6 month battery for extending GPS Tracking.”

The regular version costs $199.95 and the six month version costs $449.95. If you’re important enough to need this device, you can probably afford to upgrade to the longer battery — although if it takes up to six months to find you, perhaps your friends, family, and the local police department need to take a quick Google Maps class at the learning annex.

Spark Nano GPS Tracker [SkyMall]

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Have you had the heart sinking feeling of opening up the mail and finding a traffic ticket, with a $100, $250, $375 fine or higher? Yet you were never pulled over by a policeman – so how did you get this violation? Are your insurance rates going to go up?

The ticket has a picture of the back of your vehicle with the license plate clearly visible. You have been caught by an automated red light camera or speed camera system. Cities across the country are installing these systems to free up officers, catch all violators regardless of time of day, and hopefully cause drivers to be more careful.

As a professional truck driver, limousine driver or delivery driver – your earnings are diminished by traffic fines. Even the typical driver can’t ignore the possibility of getting a ticket and then having to fight the traffic ticket, or pay the fines and risk your insurance rates going up.

A growing solution is to use your GPS as a traffic camera warning system. First, how does a red light camera system work? The city pays for cameras or speed detectors to be installed at intersection or road locations where many traffic violations take place. Cameras, sensors and lights are installed so that when a vehicle drives too fast, or runs the red light, the lights flash and the cameras capture the vehicle making a violation. No officer intervention is needed. The license plate is read by the computers and through vehicle registration databases a ticket is issued and sent to your home.

So why not use a radar detector? First, many states have made radar defectors and jammers illegal. Second, most radar detectors can’t detect red light cameras since they are not sending out a signal like a radar gun.

Your GPS is the answer. There is a feature on every GPS called POI, or Points of Interest. A POI database holds locations of any address or location of places you may want to be acknowledged about. For example, a relative’s home, or a hotel, restaurant, or park. You can add that location to a POI database so that when you approach the location, the GPS will beep as you approach and display what the location is. Whenever you save an address that you want the GPS to give you directions to reach, that location becomes a Point of Interest (POI).

You can load a database of POI into your GPS and have it signal when you approach any of those locations. So companies are now providing many POI databases for red light camera locations, speed camera locations, and others. This works for any GPS – Garmin, Tom Tom, Magellan and others.

Is this legal? Yes, and most police departments endorse the use of GPS POI databases of red light cameras and speed camera locations. The departments goal is to have vehicles slow down and be careful through those locations. Your GPS is not a radar detector, it does not jam any signals. Since you have it in your car, why not turn it on and have it warn you of any upcoming speed traps or intersections with traffic cameras?

Here is what you should look for in obtaining a POI database for your GPS. You want a database that has the largest number of locations in the database. Hundreds of cameras are being added across the country daily. One firm has over 140,000 locations in their database already. If you have less than 10,000, you’re not doing yourself much good.

You also want the database to be easily downloaded to your particular brand of GPS. Make sure the provider has their POI database formatted for your brand. Some have a generic database that takes a few steps of reformatting for your brand. It is easiest to have a database already formatted for your particular GPS brand.

You want the database updated often. While you may not upload the POI locations everyday, you want a provider to be updating the database every day. That way when you do choose to refresh your database, you are getting the latest locations known.

Lastly, you want to be able to upload your database as often as possible. People who drive for a living may want to refresh their database daily. Some providers limit the number of times you can refresh your database in a set time period.

Costs can vary for the database. While some are free, in general, those tend to be the smallest amount of locations and hardest to load. You can buy a monthly subscription, yearly, or the best bet seems to be the lifetime subscriptions. For $99, a lifetime subscription can allow you download the speed light cameras locations onto your GPS anytime. They tend to have the most locations and are usually formatted for the major GPS brands – making it the simplest and fastest method of updating your GPS POI database. If you think $99 is expensive, think how much just one camera ticket violation will cost. Avoiding just one ticket will pay for your lifetime subscription itself.

You can reduce the chances of getting an expensive traffic ticket from red light camera and speed camera locations by using your GPS. It is legal and makes better drivers of us all.

Can you afford a $250 traffic ticket? Avoid automated camera and ticketing locations. Matthew Chase participated in a review for the company 1217 Research on GPS Red Light Camera Alert systems. See the review results and recommendations at http://www.GPSSpeedTrapAlert.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Chase

Mileage Logger GPS Review

We just learned about a new GPS unit that logs your milage so you can use the report to keep track of how many miles you have traveled.  This new mileage logger unit is geared to people who use their cars for business and report their mileage to the IRS for a tax deduction.  I did not know that you can deduct 58.5¢ for every mile you drive for business.  These miles, and dollars can add up quickly and this mileage logger unit by Vulocity stores where you have driven online and you can link each trip to a specific job or project.

Besides being a mileage logging system this GPS unit also can help you find your car or work vehicle if it is ever lost or stolen or can be used to keep an eye on an employee travels. If you opt for this extra add on service you can view your mileage online, select your trips and classify them as business, charity, commute, medical or personal. In addition, you’ll be able to insert comments for the purpose of each trip. Each record contains easy to read addresses and precise maps to help you remember the purpose of the trip. You have the option to export the records to Excel; and if you like, you can also merge, delete or add records.

Pricing is listed below, $199 for the basic mileage logger unit and online mileage tracker system,

$18.95 a month to add on their airtime service.

Another extra service is a panic button that sends a text message when you are in an emergency by pressing the  panic button; the emergency text message will contain your name, latitude-longitude and physical address.

This GPS mileage logger unit is pocket sized so it moves easily from vehicle to vehicle, it is about the size of a cell phone or walkie talkie.  It even has a belt clip so you can easily keep this little GPS mileage logger right by your side when you are traveling for business.

This GPS enabled device acquires the start and end location of a trip automatically and also calculates the distance traveled; your records are transmitted via the cellular network (GSM) and are accessible with your personal login information on our secure website www.mileagelogger.com. Just plug the Mileage Logger with the provided car adapter and the mileage logger will take care of the rest.

What’s the cons?  Well it is kinda ugly, they could of done a better job with their case.  I also would rather pay for stuff like this up front and not need a monthly fee to take advantage of all of the features like the GPS panic button.  Probably if I was going to make a GPS mileage logger I would have built it around a traditional GPS unit so I could have the benefits of auto navigation and tracking the miles that I traveled in one device.  Until then though this is not a bad substitute.

The GPS mileage logger keeps track of your changing location and counts your mileage as you go. At the end of your trip, the unit sends your start and end locations and mileage over the wireless data network to Vulocity.  This mileage logging device even determines the street address of your locations via GPS and places all data for this trip into a record for you. Your mileage records are available to you online from their website.

Whether your thinking about using this GPS mileage logger for yourself or a small fleet it looks like it could earn it’s keep in a short time.  Vulocity is also offering a free 15 day trial to give this little mileage logger GPS unit a chance to prove itself on the road.

STOP fudging your business mileage at tax time. The IRS will find out, and then you’re SCREWED!


Say goodbye to tax audits, losing money and manually logging your miles!

GPS (Global Positioning System) An automotive navigation system is a satellite navigation system designed for use in automobiles. It typically uses a GPS navigation device to acquire position data to locate the user on a road in the unit’s map database. Using the road database, the unit can give directions to other locations along roads also in its database. Dead reckoning using distance data from sensors attached to the drivetrain, a gyroscope and an accelerometer can be used for greater reliability, as GPS signal loss and/or multipath can occur due to urban canyons or tunnels.

Automotive navigation systems were the subject of extensive experimentation, including some efforts to reach mass markets, prior to the availability of commercial GPS.

Most major technologies required for modern automobile navigation were already established when the microprocessor emerged in the 1970s to support their integration and enhancement by computer software. These technologies subsequently underwent extensive refinement, and a variety of system architectures had been explored by the time practical systems reached the market in the late 1980s. Among the other enhancements of the 1980s was the development of color displays for digital maps and of CD-ROMs for digital map storage.[1]

However, there is some question about who made the first commercially available automotive navigation system. There seems to be little room for doubt that Etak was first to make available a digital system that used map-matching to improve on dead reckoning instrumentation, which arguably made car navigation systems practical for the first time.[original research?] However, Japanese efforts on both digital and analog systems predate Etak’s founding;[citation needed]

	Garmin Nuvi 350 GPS Navigator and Personal Travel Assistant Was: $535.70 Now: $329.99			Garmin Nuvi 780 Personal Travel Assistant Was: $857.13 Now: $799.99			Garmin Nuvi 270 GPS Navigator Was: $642.84 Now: $449.99
	Garmin StreetPilot c550 Was: $642.84 Now: $329.99			Garmin Nuvi 260W Was: $428.56 Now: $399.99			Garmin Nuvi 5000 GPS Navigator and Personal Travel Assistant Was: $857.13 Now: $799.99

Alpine claims to have created the first automotive navigation system in 1981. However, according to the company’s own historical timeline[2], the company claims to have co-developed an analog automotive navigation product called the Electro Gyrocator, working with Honda. This engineering effort was abandoned in 1985. Although there are reports of the Electro Gyrocator being offered as a dealer option on the Honda Accord in 1981, it’s not clear whether an actual product was released, whether any customers took delivery of an Electro Gyrocator-equipped Accord, or even whether the unit appeared in any dealer showrooms; Honda’s own official history appears to pronounce the Electro Gyrocator as not “practical”. See below for Honda’s history of the project.

Honda claims[1] to have created the first navigation system starting in 1983, and culminating with general availability in the 1990 Acura Legend. The original analog Electro Gyrocator system used an accelerometer to navigate using inertial navigation, as the GPS system was not yet generally available. However, it appears from Honda’s concessions in their own account of the Electro Gyrocator project that Etak actually trumped Honda’s analog effort with a truly practical digital system, albeit one whose effective range of operation was limited by the availability of appropriately digitized street map data.

[...] progress in digital technology would not stop simply because Honda had turned its attention to analog. In 1985, for example, the U.S. company ETAK introduced its own digital map navigation system. Although the system’s effective range-the area of geographical coverage-was limited, the announcement was a dour one for Nakamura and his staff. Therefore, ultimately the development of a practical analog system was shelved. The staff experienced indescribable feelings of disappointment. The development of [Honda's] digital map navigation system resumed in 1987, following a three-year hiatus.[3]

Both Mitsubishi Electric[2] and Pioneer[3] claim to be the first with a GPS-based auto navigation system, in 1990. Also in 1990, a draft patent application was filed within Digital Equipment Co. Ltd. for a multi-function device called PageLink that had real-time maps for use in a car listed as one of its functions.

Magellan, a GPS navigation system manufacturer, claims[4] to have created the first GPS-based vehicle navigation system in the U.S. in 1995.