GPS jammers are believed to be mostly used by people driving vehicles fitted with tracking devices in order to mask their whereabouts.
"We believe there's between 50 and 450 occurrences in the UK every day,"
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17119768
Has this affected any of you road warriors ?
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Wrapping the tracker in foil is cheaper.
I know one driver who pulls the wires out of his tracker on a regular basis, the office think his vehicle must have "dodgy wiring" and has stopped trying to get it fixed.
My solution to driving a trackered vehicle is, er, to go where I'm supposed to go :)
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Its time we dealt with people that do this sort of thing more severely.
Delay an ambulance going to an emergency resulting in loss of life - charged with murder.
Delay a train because you stole cable - charged with terrorism.
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Zippy, I understand you feeling as you do and you're quite right.
However it necessary to understand the level of privacy a tracker takes away from a lorry driver.
During the first week I had mine fitted I was loading at a packaging firm in Yate and when I got there at 6 pm they told me my load wouldn't be ready to load until 6am, even though they worked all night.
They kindly allowed me to park in their staff car park overnight though but explained they had a strict no HGV vehicle movement policy between 10pm and 6am because of local residents so I wasn't to go down to the loading bay until 6am.
About 1am I woke and needed to go to the toilet ..quickly.
I had to get dressed and walk all around the perimeter, past the loading bays to find it.
As I got half way back to the lorry I had to turn round and go back again, and again and again.
The fork lift driver in the loading bay spotted me and asked if I was alright.
I told him I seemed to have a stomach bug and he told me to bring the lorry ( very slowly and quietly) down to the loading bay as it was close to the toilet.
This was at around 3am.
The following morning as I got loaded and was rolling on to the M5, I had a phone call from the office asking why I had moved my lorry aproximately 800 yards at 3.09am during my daily rest period.
My reply was something along the lines of 'so now we can't even go for a poo without the office knowing despite being 300 miles away'
Not quite that politely though, after not a lot of sleep.
I hope this puts it into perspective a little.
Pat
Last edited by: pda on Wed 22 Feb 12 at 16:36
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Pat,
Appreciate that some overzealous officials will alway monitor every little thing. We have a good time and management system at work. Tots up the hours we spend doing something and bills the right people.
Most of the managers are happy with it as they can see which members of their team are active and which are not.
One manager wants to know down to the nth degree what his staff are doing and even in to the evening (he expects his staff to work over the contracted 35 hours). Now we all do, because we want to do a good job, but it certainly isn't expected. It takes his team more time to fill in the report then it does to do the job!
I have had a boss that called me at 5 to 5 every afternoon just to see if I was still working!
I have no problems with switching off the damn things it's when "they" interfere with others that it becomes a problem.
Z
Last edited by: zippy on Wed 22 Feb 12 at 18:07
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Thanks for appreciating that I wasn't getting at you personally, Zippy.
To be fair, it was the first week we had trackers and we can't switch them off, so my Boss rang me because he knew I wouldn't be doing anything wrong and wondered how accurate they were!
I just didn't see it that way after a disturbed night;)
For 90% of our drivers they are only used to estimate delivery times..the other 10% who they do check on are always up to something they shouldn't be.
Pat
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>>>How accurate they were!
General GPS for civilians was only accurate to a few dozen yards a few years back. The Americans kept the military code for themselves, which was understandable because they paid for it.
The accuracy would constantly vary so it was impossible to judge exactly how accurate or not the co-ordinates given were.
HM Coastguard at Dover, as I understand it, were not happy with this as they had to look after a lot of ships sailing along and across the Channel and wanted a more accurate set of co-ordinates.
To solve the problem, they attached a receiver to a fixed, known point. They then constantly have a continuous reading of the "error" in the signal and were able to adjust for it and therefore have an accurate signal.
The Americans relented and allowed a more accurate signal to be broadcast.
I suspect the above is an urban myth, but I like the story.
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>> To solve the problem, they attached a receiver to a fixed, known point. They then
>> constantly have a continuous reading of the "error" in the signal and were able to
>> adjust for it and therefore have an accurate signal.
Differential GPS: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
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Thanks Focus!
But I won't let facts get in the way of a story! ;-)
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GPS jamming. - Dave_
