A friend of mine, a transportation supervisor for a large fleet of school buses, shared a problem and asked if I had a solution. He had been receiving reports of school buses speeding in rural areas on narrow two lane roads - a very serious issue for someone charged with the responsibility of safety transporting children.
It seems he had been going out with a donated portable radar and making random speed checks. The problem is there is only one of him and over 50 buses. There was no additional manpower for assignment of the task, and it just wasn't working. That is when he recalled that I had mentioned some work we do for law enforcement users in tracking suspects and monitoring patrol activity.
He asked me to give him a quick overview and what I would recommend. After a 30 minute dialog, we both concluded that I did not have (or at least didn't offer a solution), so we changed the emphasis from my "educating" him on GPS tracking to one of asking what he wanted to accomplish and at what price, under what terms. Boy, did I learn a lesson!
What he told me was he simply wanted some kind of battery powered device that could be covertly attached to random buses to monitor their activity for a few days. He didn't have much money in the budget (like many others of us these days), and he wanted something easy to use that would consume as little of his time as possible.
I asked him if I could provide a device that could be rented for a period of as little as one month with an option to purchase at any time if that would be a good start. He said yes. Then I asked him if a little weather proof box that could be magnetically attached to a hidden area of a bus would meet his needs. It would operate from internal rechargeable batteries and be operational for up to a week before charging was required. He agreed that this should work.
I then asked we could program it to send a message to his cell phone anytime that a bus exceeded a specific speed (programmable as desired). He said that sounded good but he wanted to know if there was some way he could "tune in" on the violator to determine the location of the bus. My answer was yes.
