Rocky Mountain Tracking

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GPS Tracking Aids Employers and Families

January 8th, 2013

Businesses incorporating GPS tracking are shown as some of the fastest growing in the market today; its diversity makes it a flexible tool. For instance ArgoTrak—a locally based Naples, FL, business working closely alongside software corporation Position Logic—is one of an ever-growing list of companies that utilize GPS tracking. The software has been used in everything from tracking data for long distance transportation to monitoring client company equipment to individual purposes. Just about anything you want followed—ArgoTrak can keep an eye on it.

What does ArgoTrak do?

Service providers like Position Logic use their proprietary software to work with existing client hardware, almost every known kind, in keeping employees and equipment accounted for. For instance ArgoTrak utilizes the program mainly in conjunction with fleet management (like long-haul truck and taxi transportation or rental companies) but can also provide surveillance assistance to individuals: senior citizens, small children, personal cars and bikes, and family pets. A GPS tracker is placed on each vehicle or individual and monitored 24-7 from ArgoTrak. When needed, ArgoTrak can arrange a pre-determined periphery that when the item or person crosses the line, ArgoTrak’s client receives a message about the violation. Other data gathered from the installed tracking device includes start or stop time, time spent sitting still, and speed or location of the vehicle at any point of the day.

What are the benefits?

This kind of GPS tracking accountability can greatly economize a company’s resources. Employees are monitored whenever the company vehicle is in their care and allows managers to find out whether it’s being used solely for business purposes. No longer can workers use their company’s gas or time for personal or possibly unlawful reasons. Managers will know if they’ve been speeding past legal limits, making unauthorized side stops, or sitting anywhere for too long without a good excuse. If time is of utmost importance as is often the case with emergency service companies like plumbing or electrical, management can dispatch—thanks to GPS tracking—the specialist closest to the area of the service call.

In addition, ArgoTrak’s GPS tracking provides safety for individuals who require constant supervision for both medical reasons (Alzheimer’s, dementia, mentally impaired) and family reasons (young children and teenagers).

Track Your Family: Keep Them Safe

December 9th, 2012

It is not uncommon for children to walk or bike to and from school. Teens frequently borrow their parent’s car or take their own to weekend parties or weeknight study sessions. Many elderly folks refuse to acknowledge that their memory or eyesight is now too weak for driving. These three facts can cause many serious and dangerous problems when it comes to locating those people you love. Problems like these can be solved with the simple and convenient solution of placing a GPS tracking device in the child’s backpack and the teen or senior’s car.

At first, this solution may seem a bit unethical. You may feel that you are overstepping your boundaries with regards to your family member’s privacy. However, when it comes to those closest to you, to what lengths would you go to ensure their safety? The GPS tracking device will allow you to make sure your family stays safe. It is a small, nondescript device that can easily be placed on the dash of a car or in a magnetic box under the car. The Nano does not look like the traditional GPS tracking system. It more closely resembles something like a toll device and will therefore eliminate embarrassment for your teen when he’s with his friends. The discreet appearance of this device could potentially provide more safety for your car as well if it were to be stolen. The thief wouldn’t know to remove the Nano because it looks so harmless.

Consider how GPS tracking would allow for you to build trust and accountability with your children. Obviously, you would inform them that the device is attached to the car or that it is going to be inside their backpack. This information helps the teens remain truthful to their word when they tell you where they’ll be going for the evening. It also helps you know if something goes wrong on your child’s way home from school. As far as using this device for the older members of your family, if they were to go missing, then you would be able to track their location without a hitch because of the reliable tracking system of this GPS device.

This GPS tracking system is water resistant, motion activated, and has a long battery life of about three weeks. It is also very light weight, allowing easy transport if you do choose to place it in your child’s backpack. The device allows you to monitor your family member’s travels easily through online and mobile applications. Perhaps you had not previously thought about the practical use of a GPS tracking system in this way. Now you will be able to rest at ease, knowing the location of your family and that their safety is certain.

GPS Tracking: A Use for Everyone

December 7th, 2012

With all of the privacy concerns GPS devices bring to the table, it’s making those who use them feel a little bit guilty. Whether tracking a spouse or monitoring the whereabouts of a child, it seems the user can always talk themselves out of a guilty moment by reminding themselves of the GPS device’s necessity.

Amber Alert GPS tailors their devices towards those with children, typically between the ages of 2 and 10. The child can press a button to send a message, carry on a voice call with the parent, or the parent can call the tracker and hear what is happening where their child is. It will also send out an alert anytime the child comes within 150 meters of a known sex offender. This GPS tracking device retails for $200, and is $14.99 a month for basic features and $24.99 a month including the voice call and sex offender alert options.

For the outdoorsman, there is the the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger, discussed in a recent RMT article where it saved a hunter’s life after a fall from his horse. This GPS device is $119.99 plus $99 per year for service.

Everyone can agree that the SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger is a useful tracking tool. However, when it comes to tracking your spouse or child, there are mixed feelings. Some say using a tracker on your child is a sign of an overprotective parent. However, executives at Amber Alert GPS disagree, saying that GPS tracking makes the children feel more independent because it allows the parent to appear less protective than the parent who doesn’t allow their child to walk to school alone at all. The GPS tracking device gives the parents peace of mind, allowing them to virtually walk with their child every second they are away.

The company recommends that parents be forthcoming about the tracker’s use and purpose with their children, especially instructing them how to use the device in an emergency. As the child gets older, privacy will become more and more important. “If the parents have a deal – ‘You can use my car if we put a locator on it, and if you ever get in a bind, I’ll know exactly where you are.’ – most teenagers won’t mind that,” said Chris Newton, chief executive of Securus, manufacturers of the eZoom GPS tracker which is similar in function to the Amber Alert GPS device.

Most of these companies, however, do not sell a GPS device that will only track for a short period of time. They require a minimum yearlong service contract. For the customer looking to conduct an investigation for a month or two, turn to Rocky Mountain Tracking. Yes, the majority of our business is for companies to track their fleet, but we’re now offering a monthly rental of our personal tracking device, Ghost Rider. The device and a contract-less service plan will set you back $99.95 each month you use it, provided you are obeying current laws regarding its use.

“We probably rent out 10 to 12 devices a month, and we don’t ask questions,” said our own Gary Whitney. “Occasionally, I’ll get a person – usually it’s the wife – who feels guilty about doing it. But not so guilty that they don’t go ahead and get the device.”

Is It OK To Track Children WIth GPS?

December 1st, 2012

It’s a touchy question. Is it ethical to track our children with GPS tracking devices? Certainly, most people can understand using a tracking device on an autistic child, or a similar situation where the child is in particular danger of wandering. But what about tracking teens in order to verify there whereabouts? The waters get murkier and opinions vary widely.

The startribune.com advice columnist, Amy Dickinson writes: “I am completely, totally and utterly opposed to installing tracking or monitoring technology on kids’ devices without their knowledge. … You cannot use technology to mitigate the work (or risks) of parenting. … You should confirm their whereabouts the old-fashioned way — by getting to know their friends, calling their parents to verify plans, and by driving them from place to place and occasionally showing up early.”

Candice Chencellor, from carrollcountytimes.com writes: “We were initially apprehensive about doing this; we didn’t want them to feel that they were being spied on, or that we don’t trust them. It has, however, given me peace of mind. We are able to pinpoint the exact location of their cell phones at all times. As a mother of two teenagers, I respect their privacy but feel entitled to know their whereabouts.”

Surely the intention of parents using GPS tracking devices to monitor their children is to protect them. Parents want to know where their children are so that if something goes wrong, they can come to the rescue. Even parents who are tracking their children to “spy” on them, are likely doing so to make sure they aren’t getting into perceived dangerous situations. Let us know where you stand on this issue in the comments!

Tracking That Fits the Average Family Budget

July 24th, 2012

A new product from Garmin makes it possible for you to affordably track anything with feet, wheels, or wings. Granted, you can track most smartphones at home, but sometimes your teenaged adventurers can “forget” to keep their phones on them, particularly if they know you are watching. Also, there are some trackable subjects that can’t carry phones (pets, for instance). The Garmin GTU 10 is small enough to attach to nearly anything, and sends back regular updates to the person back at home base. While this GPS equipment, like many others, experiences signal failure when surrounded by tall buildings, it has a few very useful features that makes it ideal for most families with a need for tracking ability.

The most popular and reliable feature of the Garmin GTU 10 is its geofencing application. On a map, the user can stake out a perimeter, then program the GPS equipment to send an alert by email or text message if it crosses the border. This is great, not only for keeping a tracked item, pet, or person inside a certain area, but also for finding out when someone enters the area—a spouse driving to work or a teen biking to school, for example. Since this feature is usually not hampered by “urban canyons” and saves battery life when compared to a periodic update system, it is powerful and quite reliable.

The standard real-time tracking that we expect in GPS equipment like this is available as well, although it works on a periodic update basis. You can set it to report location twice every minute, but the battery will only last up to 24 hours. If you only want updates every fifteen minutes, on the other hand, you might get four weeks of use before recharging the battery.

The size of the Garmin GTU 10 is another important point. It is only one by three inches in size, and less than an inch thick. It’s light enough for a jogger to forget about it, and small enough to live in a backpack without taking up valuable textbook area. The first year of service is free with the unit’s purchase, but after that the service costs about 50 dollars annually.

GPS Device Lets Parents Track Their Teens

May 19th, 2012

Getting your driver’s license for the first time is an exciting event. Driving away from the house alone for the first time is also exciting, and feels like a big step toward becoming an independent adult. But some teens might not get exactly the same exhilaration that earlier generations enjoyed if their parents choose to install the iTeen365 on their family car.

The iTeen365 is a GPS device built by a Chicago company that is already established as a producer of tracking equipment for commercial fleets. The company is now bringing the accountability of GPS to beginning drivers, allowing parents to be a “fly on the wall” of their car while their teens are driving. The tracker installs on the dashboard of the car, and it has one feature that rather obviously questions the honesty of teen drivers in general: it is tamper-proof! There’s no temptation for drivers to turn the device off, remove it from the car, or otherwise send a false message about just how they are driving.

Parents at home can view past and current locations of the GPS device online and find out how fast it has been moving. The basic concept of the iTeen365, backed up by extensive research, is that a beginning driver is statistically more likely to follow safe driving practices if he knows an adult is monitoring his activity. Until now, parents had no way of really knowing how their kids were driving on their own, short of actually following them. A teen who gets in the car and knows that his parents are probably checking his driving statistics every hour or so will hopefully drive as if an adult were in the passenger seat next to him.

You might already be able to predict the most common reactions to the release of this GPS device: Parents are excited about being able to more closely guide their teens as they develop their own driving habits, while young drivers object to the “lack of trust” that installing such a tracker indicates. Objectively, it seems that this kind of accountability will definitely reduce the number of accidents, speeding fines, and loss of driving privileges that teens face. Monthly service for the iTeen365 costs $34.95, plus the cost of the device itself and initial setup.

iTeen365 Promises Parents GPS-based Peace of Mind for Teen Drivers

May 7th, 2012

When it comes to business, one of the most popular (and, in some ways, profitable) applications of GPS technology is fleet management. Let’s say you run a trucking company in Tuscon, AZ. You own seven trucks, and pay seven drivers. You install GPS devices on each vehicle and, thanks to powerful software that analyzes every speed limit infraction, every traffic violation, every lollygagging stop, you can run your truck shop safely and efficiently. It’s a win-win, right? You can manage your fleet efficiently and lengthen the life of your vehicles. Now, a new company promises to bring fleet management technology and put it in parents’ hands. It’s called iTeen365, and it promises to be the definitive driving monitoring software for parents to track their teens.

Monitor Your Child’s Driving on the Web
It begins with a small device, about the size of a cellular phone, that’s mounted in the dashboard of your teen’s vehicle. The device is a dedicated GPS tracker. It monitors every movement of the vehicle. It monitors how fast the vehicle is going. It analyzes the data and makes it available on a website that parents may access at any time. The service costs about $35 a month; the company provides the tracking device and installation for free with a two year contract.

Family “Fleet Management”
Numerous benefits may come with GPS tracking of a teen’s vehicle by parents. Parents may see every destination their child drives to. They will see every traffic law infringement made by the teen. If the vehicle is stolen, it can be tracked for police to find. If an emergency occurs, the vehicle may be tracked by police as well. The potential safety benefits make iTeen365 a potential boon for parents who wish to keep their teens safe.

Invasion of Privacy or Priceless Parenting Tool?
Teens might not be so happy with having their every move examined by parents. Is iTeen365 an invasion of privacy, then? Is the service a breach of trust in the parent/child relationship? Does that breach of trust outweigh the benefits, especially in emergency situations that may arise involving the vehicle? That question is up to parents and teens to resolve. Certainly, if the parents bought the vehicle, they have the right to track it as they please, just as a fleet manager may track the vehicles owned by the business. Whether that tracking damages the family relationship is an issue for families and family counselors.

GPS Helps Keep Track of Troubled Teens

March 11th, 2011

Since its beginning in 1973, GPS technology has grown tremendously. GPS tracking devices can now be used almost anywhere in the world. The number of satellites has grown from the original first satellite to the current 24 satellites. These satellites orbit the earth and continuously send messages to the thousands of receivers below. These receivers could be embedded in ankle bracelets, cell phones, or dog collars. Although it was originally developed for military purposes, GPS is now used in many areas of life, public and private.

GPS tracking has been used for several years by concerned parents to keep track of their children. Some parents fear for the safety of their small children, and give their child a GPS device such as a wristwatch. This allows the parents to know their child’s exact location and also allows the child to call for help in case of an emergency.

Other parents or caregivers are concerned about their teenagers’ safety. Many school districts are also discovering the benefits of GPS tracking for their students. Some schools equip their buses with GPS systems. Others ask their students to carry GPS devices, like the Anaheim school district in California.

This school district recently implemented a new program testing the effects of GPS tracking devices worn by students who are often absent. GPS tracking devices are assigned to students who often cut class. The students are required to carry the tracking device with them at all times and must check in at five designated times.

The program also assigns an adult mentor to each student to encourage good attendance and help keep them on track. Although the program is quite expensive, the Anaheim school district hopes it will eventually pay for itself by keeping students off the streets and out of juvenile detention.

Although it may not be the perfect solution, other schools have found success with the program. There is some controversy over the California school’s decision to use GPS tracking. Schools officials wish to convey a positive image, which is why they decided to assign portable GPS devices to the students to carry with them instead of having ankle bracelets strapped to their legs.

The program is not designed to punish truants, but to guide them and foster proper behavior. With this program, schools hope to keep underage teenagers out of gangs by enforcing the school attendance policy. If the program succeeds, future effects could include benefits such as decreased crime rate.

Article Written by Greg Bartlett

GPS at Lehigh University

March 6th, 2011

Lehigh University recently announced GPS tracking will make up-to-date bus schedules available to its students. The school, located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, consists of three contiguous campuses covering 1600 acres, and half of the acreage is reserved as open space, so students have a lot of ground to cover every day. To help them out, the school runs several bus services. The Escort bus service, also called T.R.A.C.S. (Take a Ride Around Campus Safely) bus service, operates on the main academic campus. Two other services operate respectively on the other two campuses, and buses are used to transport athletic teams between facilities on different campuses as well. Schedule disruptions would normally be nearly impossible to communicate, and that’s a lot of people waiting for buses longer than necessary.

Fleet tracking is a system that puts a GPS tracker on each vehicle in a system. It’s a small device that can be put almost anywhere, and it can give the owner access to a great amount of useful information. The device sends signals to satellites, which read its geographic coordinates and transfer that information to a computer mapping system.

Now the system user can see where the vehicle is, how fast it’s moving, and what it’s estimated arrival time is. Depending on the features and software, devices can even tell you when a vehicle door is open, if the driver is abiding by speed limits, what the weather conditions are in the vehicle’s location, and much more. Businesses and other groups use this to plan better routes and keep employees accountable, increasing efficiency while decreasing fuel costs, overtime costs, and harmful emissions.
Lehigh’s transportation director is excited about the benefits to the university and its students. He cited three major reasons for implementing fleet tracking. One was to “go green,” encouraging students to take the buses rather than drive. Another was to increase students’ safety, diminishing the possibility of waiting alone at a bus stop for long amounts of time after dark. The top reason was to improve service quality through using technology. All three objectives are made possible now that students can access bus information through computers or smart-phones and are able to see more accurate arrival times. Several students have given the program a thumbs-up, saying they are more likely to ride the buses now that GPS can show them when the next bus will arrive.

Article Written by Greg Bartlett

Anaheim Schools Force Truant Students to Carry GPS

March 2nd, 2011

School districts in Anaheim, California have decided to try to keep kids in school by requiring habitually truant students to wear GPS tracking devices. According to school officials, they have tried all other methods of keeping kids in school. After a recent rise in truancy, despite these efforts, schools have decided to adopt a new, high-tech approach to keeping kids from truancy. “This is their last chance at an intervention. Anything that can help these kids get to class is a good thing” says Dale Junior High School principal, Kristen Levitin.

This new program is being tested out on 75 students with four or more unexcused absences. The GPS tracking device is given to each student, who is prompted to give their location via text message five times per day, with the last check-in time at 8pm.

The devices provide fact-checking evidence as to where the student actually is at the time of check in. Rick Martens, director of safe schools in Anaheim, explains, “so if the kid does text and say, ‘I’m here, I’m at school,’ but the GPS shows that they’re somewhere else, it obviously gives us some indicators that the student is now where he should be, and so we know to go look for them.”

Critics of this new program think GPS tracking is taking the issue too far. They believe that it is sending a message to the students that could be damaging to their self-esteem. “I feel like they come at us too hard, and making kids carry around something that tracks them seems extreme. This makes us seem like common criminals,” says Raphael Garcia, parent of a sixth grade student with six unexcused absences.

The program was developed by AIM Truancy Solutions, who worked closely with the school district. Assurances are being made to parents and students alike that the intent of the program is not to criminalize the students. Miller Sylvan, regional director of AIM, tried to quell concerns, saying, “We don’t want to criminalize the kids or have them wear any bracelet or something around their ankle that would stigmatize them. The students are frequently entering a code and interacting with the device, so we think it’s the best way to let them carry it.”

Article Written by Marisa O’Connor