A federal trapper, a state game warden and a state wildlife biologist were visiting ranchers in Northern California on Tuesday to notify them that GPS tracking signals showed the gray wolf known as OR7  was in the area, when they stopped to look over a sagebrush hillside with binoculars, said Karen Kovacs, wildlife program manager for the California Department of Fish and Game in Redding, Calif.

“There, all of a sudden, out pops a head, and there he is,” she said. “He appeared very healthy.”

Wolf OR7 Photo By Robert Shinn

California wildlife biologist Richard Shinn managed to snap a quick photo, the first shot of the animal in color, and the department posted it on its website, reported the Washington Post.

Wildlife biologists know OR7 is the real deal because he sports a GPS tracking collar and has been monitored since he was in Oregon. He is the first known wild wolf in California in 88 years. Previous claims of wolves in the Golden State all turned out to be just coyotes, dogs, or wolf-dog hybrids.

The gray wolf’s return to the Golden State isn’t unexpected, state officials said, reported the SF Gate. In fact, he could go back and forth across the border many more times before settling down.

“Round and round he goes, where he ends up no one knows,” said Kirsten Macintyre, a spokeswoman with the California Department of Fish and Game. “At this point we know only where his little blip is, nothing about what he’s going to do.”

OR7, also known as Journey, left his Oregon home back in September and traveled more than 1,000 miles to California’s northern border. He entered Siskiyou County on Dec. 28, becoming the first known wild wolf in California in 88 years.

The wolf’s GPS tracking collar uses a map that traces his trek through northern California and can be viewed on the DFG website. To protect the wolf, public mapping of his movements are delayed.

GPS tracking data shows the wolf spent two months in Siskiyou, Shasta and Lassen counties, and his whereabouts have been tracked by wildlife managers in Oregon and California.

Sheriff’s investigators admit they placed the tracking device on her vehicle in December, 2011, over fears Lynne was preparing to kidnap her son. However, they say they never turned it on and then tried and failed to retrieve it for four months, reported the Colorado Doan News.

Ms. Lynne says she looked for and discovered the GPS tracking device after several incidents in which she returned to her truck to find police nearby and thought they might have been following her. As it turns out, they were.

Lynne has repeatedly tangled with the sheriff’s office and Fort Collins city officials over a variety of issues, including what she believes is a U.N. plot to take over local government and a child-custody battle that led to her arrest.

After discovering the GPS tracking device on her vehicle, she said “That is unbelievable. I think that’s unbelievable. Isn’t that called stalking?”

A December court order demanding that she turn her son over to his father set off a chain of events Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith said “should not have happened.”

On Dec. 21, sheriff’s deputies told Lynne to turn over her son, Jaden, as ordered by the court. Lynne, believing the order to be illegal and invalid, refused at first and went to a local copy shop to write up a legal pleading. While she was inside, deputies hid a GPS tracking device under the bumper of her SUV. Then they arrested her.

“They did place a GPS tracker on that vehicle because we didn’t know where that kid was. There was a fear that she would flee with the child,” Smith said. “We had a court order that this child needed to be safely returned.”

Lynne was booked into the jail and held there until her son was handed over to his father a few hours later. She was then released, and no charges were ever brought against her. But the GPS tracking unit remained on her SUV.

Because Lynne didn’t flee, deputies never got a court order allowing them to turn the GPS tracking device on, Smith said.

In January, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that placing a GPS tracking device on a vehicle constitutes a “search” within the definition of the Fourth Amendment and therefore requires a warrant to be constitutional.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision the FBI says it has disabled about 3,000 GPS tracking devices it was using to keep track of suspects’ locations, according to the Wall St. Journal. The FBI disabled the tracking devices in order to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on warrantless GPS tracking.

Deputies tried several times to retrieve the device, but Smith said they didn’t want to trespass on private property or tip off Lynne that the tracker was there. He said they went to places where she was known to frequent in hopes of secretly retrieving it, but they were unable to get it back.

Smith said deputies were reluctant to tell Lynne they had attached the device to her SUV. Lynne is already suing the sheriff’s office over that Dec. 21 incident.

“They just couldn’t find it, and we didn’t want to trespass on private property to retrieve it,” Smith said. “Certainly in this case, the last thing I wanted to see was things that would add to her angst.”

Responded Lynne: “I guess that didn’t work out so well.”

Smith said he’s talking with his deputies about what happened and how to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Like many other agencies, the sheriff’s office much more commonly uses cell-phone data to track the location of people. He said the office has been using the GPS trackers for a number of years.

Smith said he supports the placement of the GPS tracking device on Lynne’s SUV but said losing track of it was a mistake. “I’m not happy it was just floating out there. We should have found a way. We should have gotten that thing back,” he said.

The GPS tracking device Lynne pulled from her SUV has three parts: a battery pack, a processor and GPS unit, and an external antenna.

Thursday’s national average price for a gallon of regular self-serve gasoline is $3.73, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. This is seven cents cheaper than the price one week ago, 19 cents cheaper than one month ago and 22 cents cheaper than one year ago.

This Saturday, May 5, marked one year since the peak price of 2011: $3.98 per gallon. The peak price to date this year occurred exactly one month earlier on April 5 when the national average reached $3.94. Following the 2011 peak, prices fell for 50 of 54 days, decreasing by 44 cents during that period.

Many of the forces that have been driving up gasoline prices up are reversing, and that is helping bring prices back down, though they still remain near record highs. Tensions over Iran’s nuclear program have eased, while softening economies in the U.S. and Europe have curbed demand. At the same time, some refineries pegged for closure are coming back online, and bottlenecks in the supply of crude oil are becoming unclogged.

The changes have led analysts to temper their price predictions for the summer driving season. A few months ago, some were saying pump prices could shoot above $4 a gallon and even reach $5 by the summer, but now they say that is highly unlikely. That is good news not just for America’s drivers, but also for the economy.

When gas prices near $4 per gallon, many  companies have to start looking for ways to save money. Managers look for ways to increase operating efficiencies and start paying attention to how their employees are driving.

Small changes can have a big impact on a large scale, and the cost savings can really start add up. Many are surprised to find out that a fleet tracking system can help them to see immediate results and cut costs across the board.

“We’ve known for years that our balloon launches were reaching the targeted areas because of the angry response of the North Korean government,” said Seoul USA President the Rev. Eric Foley. “But the GPS tracking devices provide us with precise verification that will enable us to further increase the accuracy of future launches.”

Though the North Korean government tries to jam the radio broadcasts and protest the balloon launches, Foley says, the GPS tracking data shows that the message is getting through. “North Korean defectors tell us that they saw the balloon flyers and heard the radio broadcasts during their time in North Korea,” says Foley, “but this GPS tracking data is priceless because it allows us to continue to refine our accuracy and targeting. Nothing beats landing a balloon in downtown Pyongyang.”

North Korea is universally regarded as the most hostile environment for Christians, Foley notes, so balloon launches provide one of the only ways to do mass distribution of Scripture and gospel messages inside the Hermit Kingdom.

From the moment a container’s trip begins, the container tracking system is activated, adding details, images, comments and delivery updates as the cargo makes its way to its destination. With this cutting-edge tracking system, full information about the status of the shipment is available 24/7.

One of the largest logistics providers in the world acquired the VeriWise tracking system to optimize its investment in a new fleet of intermodal containers. The tracking system will monitor container locations and provide web-based reports to optimize fleet pooling and dispatching. It will also dynamically update the status of in-transit loads and proactively identify and correct any gaps in customer service expectations.

The VeriWise tracking system provides real-time location and status data to improve the efficiency and security of trailer and container fleets. It is designed for quick, flexible installation on a wide range of cargo-carrying assets, with patented power management to provide exceptionally long battery life and years of maintenance-free operation.

“The reliable effectiveness of our Track & Trace tracking system drives significant operational efficiencies and customer service benefits for logistics companies,” said Darryl Miller, Chief Operating Officer of I.D. Systems. “The ease and quality of our device installation was also critical for this customer. With a large fleet of intermodal containers that travel by both truck and rail, the system had to be installed cost effectively, yet survive reliably through every conceivable kind of environmental condition.”

The total contract value is approximately $330,000.

Source: Market Watch

UHM’s research ship “Kilo Moana” was on its way to Hawaii from Guam when a tsunami was generated by an 8.8 earthquake in Chile back in February 2010. The Kilo Moana is equipped with an advanced GPS tracking system and the data it recorded mirrored the tsunami predictions from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. This is the first time a ship has ever detected a tsunami.

A highly sensitive geodetic GPS tracking system onboard  Kilo Moana detected the tsunami  even though it was only 9.4 cm high as it passed under the ship, as reported in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). This finding came as a surprise because tsunamis have such small amplitudes in the deep water, in contrast to their size when they reach the coastline, that it seemed unlikely that the tsunami would be detected using GPS unless the ship was very close to the source and the tsunami was very big.

Foster and co-authors estimate that this sort of ship-based tracking system would have been able to detect the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami within an hour, potentially saving thousands of lives. A tracking system installed on commercial ships could “improve our detection and predictions of tsunamis — saving lives and money,” said Dr. James Foster of SOEST.

Given the affordability of geodetic GPS tracking systems, and ever-improving satellite communications, it would be possible to equip a significant portion of the shipping fleet with real-time-streamed GPS tracking systems and create a cost-effective tsunami monitoring network with denser and more distributed coverage. “Our discovery indicates that the vast fleet of commercial ships traveling the ocean each day could become a network of accurate tsunami sensors,” Foster said.

Foster and his colleagues are now working on developing a network of commercial ships equipped with the geodetic GPS tracking system that could become the next phase in real-time tsunami warning in the Pacific. “There are so many ships out there that if you’ve got enough of them instrumented with the GPS tracking systems there is always going to be some ships in the neighborhood of the region that produces the tsunami,” said Foster.

Much more advanced than a handheld GPS device, the GPS tracking system on a ship would include a round antenna to help measure and transmit even the slightest wave height changes from a tsunami that would likely go unnoticed in the open ocean. The difference being measured in length of time.

“An open ocean swell has a period of maybe 15 seconds, 20 seconds. A tsunami takes maybe 20 minutes, half an hour to pass,” said Foster.

At $15,000 to $20,000 per unit, the GPS tracking system is cheaper than the current deep ocean buoys that provide tsunami data. The challenge will be getting the commercial shipping lines to jump on board to create a mobile tsunami detection system.

UH researchers hope to launch a demo system with at least two ships by the end of the year.

Source:  University of Hawaii – SOEST

“The commercial telematics market continues to enjoy good overall growth as smaller fleets and new non-trucking segments such as delivery, service, and public and private transportation are being addressed by vendors offering more affordable solutions,” said Dominique Bonte, ABI Vice President of Telematics and M2M.

Commercial Vehicle Telematics is typically the integrated use of telecommunications and information into an automobile. This technology allows for the sending, storing, and receiving of data from devices in conjunction with the remote products. A major example of telecommunications informatics is for vehicles looking for wireless connectivity, while on the move such as a GPS fleet tracking system.

Insurance telematics in commercial fleets is also finally gaining momentum with recent announcements from TomTom/Motaquote and NexTraq/GMAC. This mirrors rising interest levels in UBI in consumer markets.

ABI Research’s new “Commercial Telematics Market Data, Global” contains forecast data per region on hardware shipments, hardware revenue, tracking system users, subscribers, and service revenues in the commercial telematics sector for the US, Canada, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Africa and the Middle East. Statistics on vehicle sales and vehicles in operation are also included.

FieldLogix is one of the most feature-rich and affordable GPS fleet tracking systems on the market. FieldLogix fleet tracking system can help you to stay on top of what your drivers are doing by viewing their current locations, speeds, jobsites, ignition status and more.

The public is urging the Scottish Government to consider a GPS tracking system for the country’s most dangerous sex offenders, after an independent review of the Ryan Yates case has highlighted a number of failings by the public bodies responsible for monitoring the violent criminal.

Just days after being freed from prison, one of Scotland’s most dangerous sex offenders Ryan Yates tried to murder a grandmother in Aberdeen park, so he could abduct and rape her two young granddaughters. Yates stabbed his 60-year-old victim with a knife but she managed to fend him off as the children ran from the scene.

Yates was arrested shortly after the attack. SGTV News reported Yates later told police he had gone to the Bridge of Don park “looking to find some children to have sex with”.

After a review of the Yates case, many people are in favor of the government using a GPS tracking system to monitor “high risk offenders” like Yates who are released into the community.

Report writers paid tribute to the “sheer tenacity and strength of character” of the grandmother who Yates attacked.

The review reveals Yates pleaded with social workers in Aberdeen to let him buy a knife on the day he was released from prison. He was taken to an Asda supermarket where social workers noticed him looking at children and “trying to get their attention”, but the incident was not reported.

Commenting on the report, Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said: “Scotland has one of the most robust systems for managing sex offenders anywhere in the world and the monitoring of such offenders is now tougher than ever before. However, if processes can be improved and strengthened further, our law enforcement agencies and the Scottish Government will take every opportunity of building on and strengthening the steps already taken to protect our communities from sex offenders.”

Referring to the GPS tracking system suggestion, he said the government is “actively considering” the option.

When Kristal Wagner of Interwest Construction Inc., received an email alert from her fleet GPS tracking system reporting that a vehicle was on the move in the middle of the night, she immediately realized one of her company’s trucks had been stolen.

Ms. Wagner called the police and activated the stolen vehicle’s fleet GPS system, installed inside the vehicle. Next thing you know, the chase was on.

According to Ms. Wagner, “We had a truck stolen on Monday during the night. I used the the real-time fleet GPS tracking system to pull up the vehicle’s exact location and gave the Sheriff the information. We recovered the truck within a couple of hours. Some small items that weren’t valuable were stolen from the truck, but the vehicle was not harmed at all!”

Ms. Wagner said, “We always have the security of our equipment in mind. Tools, materials and equipment are often left overnight on the job site due to their weight and considerable bulk. When these pieces are stolen, they are almost never recovered and productivity stops – unless they are equipped with a fleet GPS tracking system.”

FieldLogix, an industry-leading GPS fleet tracking system, was successfully utilized to recover the missing truck in just a few hours.

Over 1.2 million vehicles were stolen last year in the US with an estimated value of over 7.6 billion, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. Nearly half of these vehicles are never recovered, and are commonly scrapped for parts or smuggled to another country.

Without a GPS tracking system, police can take days, weeks, and even months to recover stolen assets – if they can recover anything at all. GPS tracking devices allow an owner to track the location of their assets in real-time, and can locate a stolen vehicle or piece of equipment within minutes. Police can often recover the stolen items in less than 24 hours.

There are dozens of other reasons to have a fleet tracking system such as FieldLogix installed. But suffice it to say that this reason is at the top of the list. Being proactive about vehicle theft prevention will help keep you from becoming a victim. And that is peace of mind we all can use.

A Louisiana Senate committee approved legislation Tuesday that would give judges the discretion to mandate GPS tracking devices for certain defendants while they’re out on bail.

Sen. Gary Smith (D) filed Senate Bill 649 to target crimes involving burglary, theft and home invasion. He said individuals who carry out these crimes tend to be repeat offenders, reported The Daily Comet. “They get out on bail, and we lose track of them, and then they usually come back in for the same thing,” Smith said. “If we can keep track of them while they’re out on bail, we’ll know where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.”

Smith’s bill would allow a judge to mandate, as a condition of bail, that such defendants wear a GPS tracking device if they can afford it. If the alleged offender is unable to pay for the tracking services, a provision in the bill permits community service in lieu of payment.

The GPS tracking legislation will next be heard by the full Senate. If adopted by the House and Senate, and then subsequently signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal, the bill would become law Aug. 1.

Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre requested the bill be filed and asked the Senate Committee on Judiciary to advance the proposal. He also informed its members he owns part of a company that sells GPS tracking systems, among other related services.

The Louisiana Board of Ethics issued an opinion in 2002 stating Webre could sell ignition interlock devices, which are often required of drunk-driving offenders, just as long as he steers clear of doing business in Lafourche Parish. Webre said he’s following the same guidelines with the GPS tracking systems.

He told the committee he came up with the idea for the proposed law when he heard about a burglary involving a sex offender who was being tracked by GPS because of a court order. When coupled with the fact that Lafourche Parish has had 234 burglaries reported this year, he said a light went off. “They were able to solve that burglary with the GPS tracking data,” Webre said.