The Pros and Cons of Using GPS Cell Phones To Track Teens

Categories: GPS Articles | April 30th, 2009 | by Mike Tucker | no comments

Using a cell phone to track a teenager is widely and readily available to the general public. The technology to do so is in almost every cell phone out in America, all thanks to some requirements instituted by the federal government. This type of GPS tracking has several advantages and disadvantages that parents should consider when deciding what tracking solution works best for them.

GPS Cell Phone Tracking Advantages

Probably the biggest benefits to using a cell phone to track your teen is that they probably already have one. It seems like the vast majority of teens are constantly talking on their phones or texting their friends. The great part about this is that you won't have to buy another device to use for tracking your teen. This means more money in your pocket to spend on other things.

The fact that most teens have and use a cell phone also provides another benefit - teens have great incentives for keeping their phone on and keeping the battery charged. How will they talk to their friends will a dead cell phone? How are they going to text boys with their cell phone off? The obvious answer is that they won't and that is good news for parents concerned about their child's safety or driving habits.

It also means that in most circumstances the cell phone is going to be with your teenager.

Another key benefit to using a cell phone for tracking is that the device is also a phone. If you kid is at a location that you didn't expect or they are heading toward a strange location you can give them a quick call to see what is happening with them. Or, if their driving is going a little too fast, you could call them to remind them to slow down and obey the posted limits.

Finally, the great part about using a mobile phone to track your teen is that cell phone towers are everywhere. Chances are if the places you go have reception then they are also going to be able to get a fix on your kid's location - which is exactly what you want to do.

GPS Cell Phone Tracking Disadvantages

Despite being incredibly useful, cell phone tracking does have a few disadvantages that need to be discussed. The greatest of these disadvantages is probably that everyone knows that cell phones can be tracked.

This can come into play in two circumstance. The first is the worst case scenario: you teen gets abducted. Any person seeking to do your teen harm is going to get ride of their cell phone right off the bat. This means that your only means of tracking their location is now gone - at exactly the moment you wanted to use it most.

The other problem is that teens themselves will know that their phone can be tracked and will simply turn it off or leave it at a friends house. While this happens you will be "blind" to their whereabouts and they will be able to do whatever it is they wanted to do in secret.

Both of these can be avoided with simple parenting tools, but they are definitely worth mentioning.

And the last disadvantage is that cell phone reception does not extend everywhere. Even though it reaches many, many place, cell phones can lose signal in all sorts of locations. A lost signal means that no information is getting out to you about your teens location.

In the end, whether or not to use your teens cell phone to track them is going to be up to you. Does it fit with your parenting style and your current needs? Will your teen really be safer with it? All these factors come into play when considering GPS cell phone tracking for teens.

If you are interested in more information about this topic check out Tracking Your Teen with their GPS Enable Cell Phone where the topic of GPS tracking for teens cell phones is explored in greater detail.

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GPS Tracking Your Car To Keep Tabs On Your Teenage Driver

Categories: GPS Articles | April 30th, 2009 | by Mike Tucker | no comments

Using GPS to track vehicles - it is not exclusively for the spies and the police anymore. With the benefits of this powerful technology, companies are allowing consumers to take charge of their lives and install GPS devices in their vehicles.

The reasons to use GPS tracking can be many: you can use these devices to help recover a stolen vehicle, or can help keep an eye on your car when you loan it to someone (to ensure they remain at the speed limit and drive safely), or they could even be used as an aid to parenting a teen rebel. How you choose to use GPS tracking is up to you.

One of the more interesting to uses of this new technology is helping parents in parenting their children. By installing a GPS tracking device in your car or truck, you get an instant awareness of your son's driving habits and location. This can be very important for several reasons and in the hands of a wise and discerning parents can be very helpful in educating children to respect the law and be safe.

Cars are an important part of teen culture. They are the main way that teenagers these days travel. Teenagers used to go on foot, by road, bike, or had to get bus tickets to get around. The car has replaced all these forms of transportation and have become the great engine of adolescence.

Because cars are so important to teenagers, you know that once your child is legally able to sit behind the wheel they will begin hunting to get the keys in their hands.

They will say: "Come on Dad, I need to get the keys so I can drive to the house of Sarah. Everyone is going to see a movie there!" Or they may say something like: "But mom, it will be much easier for everyone if I just drive to school in the morning and drive home from soccer practice." To be honest, there is often a lot of validity to what they say.

It really is easier for our young people to drive themselves around. It make us spend less time driving around and running errands. But there is something in us that wonders if it is really good for them to be alone so often. "Is it safe?" we wonder. "Are they going to drive like we would like? Will I know where they are?"

Tracking your teenager with GPS is a great way to help you learn the answers to all your questions while enjoying the convenience of leaving the teen to drive themselves around.

If you are not familiar with how the GPS is able to follow the car of your child, here is a brief introduction:

GPS means Global Positioning System and this system consists of a dozen satellites orbiting the earth. These satellites emit a radio signal such that GPS receivers can pick up.

The device is used to track your car by taking these signals that communicate information to your unit and processing that information. This information may include the time that the transmission was sent via satellite and the satellite that sent the message. Your GPS unit takes the information and uses mathematics - specifically the principles of unity trilateration - to calculate the position at some point in time.

If you only had a GPS logger that would be the end of it. But a GPS device that can be used in a car your child drives will not be a GPS logger, it will be a GPS pusher. This device will transmit the information to a processing center where the company you purchased your subscription will interpret the data and make it available to you via the Internet or some other means.

The information that it will deliver often includes the speed and direction of the teen that you are tracking. They will even keep a history of car's position for a month or more!

Using GPS tracking on your teen's car is certainly a valid way to learn information about your teenager that they might withhold from you otherwise. Parents have a right to know where their teenage is.

If you are interested in more information about this topic check out Track Your Teen's Car With GPS, an article where this topic is explored in greater detail. There are other alternatives to car tracking - one of which is gps tracking teens with cell phones.

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Tracking a Shipment Via GPS

Categories: GPS Articles | April 29th, 2009 | by Mike Tucker | no comments

For any company that is shipping goods with an Atlanta courier service, one of the features that can be most useful to the company is a more up to date method of tracking the shipments. In previous years, package tracking with a courier company was always something that was not extremely accurate and not very helpful as well. Updates would consist of letting the client know where the last major city or depot the package passed through, but information that was more up to the minute or accurate than that was extremely hard to come by. The integration of GPS tracking into the new practices of a lot of major courier companies has allowed for a much more accurate means for clients tracking their packages. For any client that operates a company that deals in time sensitive materials or deliveries, being able to access much more accurate status updates on their delivery can help them to serve their clients a great deal better. That is why more and more couriers are now offering GPS tracking, and why more clients are looking to hire couriers that do offer that services.

If you find a good courier service that offers GPS tracking, they may also offer several other features that are integrated with that service. For example, the GPS tracking is often integrated with the handheld units that the couriers carry with them. These include features like electronic signature capture which can be sent immediately upon receipt to the client for delivery confirmation. This is the sort of feature that is also of use for clients, not only for allowing them to know exactly what the status of their package is, but also to confirm that their valuable goods are always being delivered into the right hands.

Tracking a shipment with GPS is something that clients are beginning to not only look at as a bonus in their chosen courier company, but are instead starting to view as a necessity. It simply doesn't make sense for someone to do business with a courier that doesn't offer this kind of service when there surely is another courier who can provide that same feature, and likely at not a great deal of increased cost. GPS tracking provides security, and a much more accurate timeline, both things which are extremely important to people from all sectors of business. With GPS units becoming cheaper and more common all the time, with them now even being integrated with cell phones, it might be only a matter of time before there is no excuse for a courier to not offer this service.

Paul McDuffy is an International Consultant for Atlanta courier service companies. With exceptional knowledge of courier services in Atlanta, Paul also works closely with a team specializing in small business marketing ideas.

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GPS Can Track Anything

Categories: GPS Articles | April 29th, 2009 | by Mike Tucker | no comments

GPS has long been used for fleet tracking by businesses and the military, but now this technology is making its way in our homes in an ever increasing fashion.

The first on the scene with GPS navigation units. These small, compact devices fit inside our cars and helped us find our ways out on the highways and streets of our towns and communities. At first these gadgets were large, pricey, and hard to get. Today, millions upon millions of units have been sold and many Americans enjoy the ease and comfort of computer aided navigation for a relatively reasonable price.

After navigation units came GPS small enough to fit inside cell phones. Mobile providers were required to provide tracing technology in all there phones in the early 2000s, and many companies went with GPS tracking chips over using a cell tower based strategy. This then led to a boom in cell phone GPS.

Navigation technology is now integrated into cell phones. You can track your spouse, teen, or child with their cell phone for relatively nominal fee - around $5 a month. You can even use your phone to get housing quotes at your location!

The most interesting thing about this proliferation of GPS technology is that the same thing is going on whether you are tracking a fleet of vehicles or your teen driver - trilateration.

Trilateration is a mathematical principle that takes the known location and distance from three or more objects and calculates the your location. Both GPS fleet tracking and kid tracking work exactly the same way.

A satellite circling the earth in geosynchronous orbit emits a signal that gets picked up a GPS unit. As the unit collects more and more signals from these satellites it plugs them all into a math equation that tells the device's computer where the unit is.

If the unit is a data logger, it takes the position information and stores it in its database and displays the information to the user if it has a visual display. This is your more traditional GPS navigation units.

If the unit is a data pusher, it takes the position information and sends it out via cell phone or radio signal to a central processing center where the information is stored for access via the Internet. This is real-time GPS tracking.

Both types of tracking have their advantages and disadvantages and should be applied in their own special situations. For example, you certainly don't want a data logger if you are trying to get real time information on your teen's driving habits are are trying to keep your child safe from predators. You also are not going to need or want a real time tracking solution for car navigation (unless you are a business too). It just doesn't make sense.

We probably have not even begun to scratch the surface of all the things that can be tracked with GPS as a society, and we have already used it to track many strange and incredible things. People have even used it to create art! Only time will tell what we will use GPS tracking for next.

A GPS fleet tracking company generally offers much more than just fleet management services - they also provide families with GPS solutions too. If this interests you, consider learning more about buying GPS fleet tracking

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GPS Tracking Has Contributed To Travel Ease

Categories: GPS Articles | April 29th, 2009 | by Mike Tucker | no comments

The one that makes GPS tracking devices work is what we call Global Positioning System Tracking software. This kind of software makes tracking devices to transmit a signal which will be received by satellites established in space. In return, the space satellites narrow down the devices geographic location or the location where a particular search is in. The location information returned is basically in latitude and longitude, which is then transformed by a system decoder into a recognizable address.

GPS tracking software was first placed in use by the American Department of Defense, formerly utilizing 21 satellites and 3 replacement satellites. The software was substantially designed for aviation, nautical navigation and land navigation. The global positioning satellite tracking software is a very smart designed system. The various satellites set up in orbit, sends signals that track the right location of a receiver, be it a vehicle, mobile phone, or other form of transportation or tracking devices.

At present, the satellites' number have increased to 30 resulting to a wider range of global positioning satellite locations. But a GPS tracking software may also locate vehicles or persons that are not in possession of a satellite receiver. To quickly get a location, it will just need an unobstructed view of the satellites.

GPS was previously named NAVSTAR or what we used to call Navigation System for Timing and Ranging, now we have known it as Global Positioning system. The satellite tracking software has been so helpful in terms of navigation-related tasks, as traveling in unchartered territories have not been simple most especially in times of bad weather condition. So that, the satellite tracking software was made basically for traveling in unknown routes, indicating the exact location of a moving vehicle in order to compute what routes should be taken to give assistance in reaching its intended destinations.

The tracking software is also what enables huge and bulky delivery trucks in the U.S. to know their locations and inform their base headquarters of where they are located. The tracking software can do this because the user can have an interaction with the tracking unit in several methods. By using the GPS tracking software, a two-way communication between the truck driver and base headquarters can be managed possible, in order to inspect the status of the delivery truck on its way to its target route or destination.

The best thing that anybody can be certain about having the satellite software is that for as long as there is no obstruction of the satellite signals, you can track the location-- on where you are and where you should be heading.

For more information on GPS Tracking visit http://www.gpstrackinginfo.com/

Article Source: ArticleSpan

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