The following is a list of some on-line commercial sources of image files that are suitable for use as map images.
www.unearthedoutdoors.net
UnearthedOutdoors resells image tiles measuring 2° on a side (49,284km² at the equator). True Marble™ is available for purchase for latitudes between N84° and S60°. The tiles are georeferenced in WGS84 Lat/Lon projection for use in all modern GIS programs. The GeoTIFF format maintains compatibility with popular image processing programs such as Adobe Photoshop™. Mercator projection and tiled JPEG format are also available. Other formats and projections are available on request.
www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/purchase.
WMS Global Mosaic GeoTIFF Download
This page contains links for a complete set of the raw image data contained in the WMS Global Mosaic, base resolution only. The files are grayscale geotiffs, with the proper geolocation tag information for integration in GIS. These gzip compressed geotiff files are very large, between 350 and 500 Megabytes each, and will decompress to 800MB tiffs, 28800×28800 pixels, covering 4×4 arc-degrees fo the panchromatic band and 8×8 arc-degrees for the other bands.
www.collections.sdsc.edu/dac2/telascience/telascience_data/onearth
When a Raveon GPS Transponder received an over-the-air position message from a tracked car, boat, truck, or person, it sends a message out of its serial port. The message it outputs contains the ID of the vehicle that it received the position report from, along with the vehicle’s latitude and longitude.
The above message is in Raveon’s proprietary PRAVE message format. It was from vehicle 0003 whose position is at 33 8.888 North, 117 13.1500 West. Details of the PRAVE message are in the M7 transponder user manual, and on this Tech Blog at http://ravtrack.com/GPStracking/2009/the-prave-message-format/
Raveon’s M7 series of GPS transponders have various built-in drivers enablinging them to output vehicle positions in a variety of different formats. Some formats are in the industry standard NMEA 0183 and other message types are in proprietary formats. The type of message that the M7 transponder sends out it serial port may be configured by the user, using the GPS x command.
Below is a list of message formats that the M7 Transponder supports:
TLL ($GPTLL) NMEA format Target Lat-Lon
WPL ($GPWPL) NMEA format Waypoint Location
GSV ($GPGSV) NMEA format Satellites in View
GGA ($GPGGA) NMEA format Essential Fix Data
PRAVE ($PRAVE) Raveon format Multi-Target Lat-Lon and More
In Dallas, Texas, police recently encountered an auto theft ring by tracking the GPS transponder on a stolen lawnmower:
Officers found at least 12 of the 25 vehicles have been reported stolen. Authorities are calling it a major auto theft operation.
Authorities spent most of the afternoon and evening hauling away stolen vehicles that were to be stripped and sold for parts. Authorities also seized two guard dogs that were on short chains.
In the future, we can expect that all assets of significant value will include a GPS tracking device. Not only could it help you track down your stolen property, but it might also help you remember which neighbor borrowed your tools.
One area where GPS technology will see greater improvements is in how it is used within large buildings and other interior spaces. Currently, it is difficult to receive GPS signals through walls and structures, but this reach can be improved with GPS repeaters and other ground-based systems. One can imagine how useful this might be in locating company personnel within a corporate office building, hospital, etc. In addition to fleet tracking your vehicle fleet you could also have a handle on all your staff in real time. Here is an article about how current GPS technology is being extended.
The system is being currently tested in Finland. In fact, it is not the first indoor system but the others have mostly been for specialist uses, such as helping firefighters find colleagues in smoke-filled buildings. This system, developed by Nokia, will work with existing handsets and infrastructure, according to the scientists.
One thing it does need, however, is access to maps of the inside of buildings. This may not be feasible for private homes, but many public sites such as big sports centres and universities already make maps available.
Perhaps as building information modeling becomes standard, public spaces will be able to submit mapping data to GPS mapping data providers or through a distributed system of mapping data?
I was reading this article earlier today about how a stolen ambulance was recovered using the vehicle’s GPS transponder. Obviously, this is just one more benefit to tracking your vehicle fleet with GPS-based solutions. It may even be possible that insurance companies will factor the presence of GPS tracking systems into your company’s insurance policy, which could result in discounts to damage coverage since vehicles should be easier to recover if lost or stolen. Likewise, if a vehicle is lost or stolen it can be recovered in less time and with less impact to your fleet capacity. Eventually we will see more and more equipment tracked in real time with GPS.
A recent study by C.J. Driscoll and Associates shows that fleet vehicles, construction equipment, and mobile workers account for about 3.6 million GPS devices in use in the United States. This number is expected to increase to about 6.5 million by the year 2012 as more businesses realize the benefits of GPS fleet tracking in terms of fuel savings, asset tracking, and overall efficiency. We expect these trends to continue until all commercial vehicle fleets adopt GPS fleet management as central to their logistic efforts.
One of the issues with the accelerated economic growth of the developing world is the reliability of road and mapping data. In many places like Dubai and China construction is taking place at such a rapid pace that municipal authorities cannot assign addresses fast enough to meet demand. Likewise, in other places like India, existing mapping data is simply unreliable. This is where GPS can be ideal as GPS uses your specific position and geographic coordinates, which makes it immune to problems that plague traditional mapping systems that use street names and other arbitrary assignments of position.
In places like Nagpur, India, city officials are meeting such challenges by installing fleet management systems in their ambulances and emergency vehicles in order to best respond to emergencies and disasters:
Dr Pradhan said that whenever anybody calls 102, the control room can track the ambulance nearest to the spot and direct it to the place. “OCHRI has installed the device on all its six ambulances as well as those of other private hospitals,” he said.
Dr Noorul Amin, senior medical officer and in-charge of Emergency Medical Services at OCHRI, said that GPS technology uses radio waves to calculate the distance between vehi Dr Pradhan said these ambulances would have one hospital staff capable of providing first aid at the spot itself. He also underlined the need for providing all life-saving medicines in them. He said the project was brainchild of NMC commissioner Aseem Gupta.
Fleet management using GPS is an ideal way to quickly respond and deploy your assets to react to crisis quickly. This is a trend we expect to continue.
Many companies are starting to see the benefits of tracking their fleets with GPS-based solutions in terms of fuel cost savings and more efficient route planning. With GPS, you can constantly optimize your routes, which will add directly to the bottom line over time through more efficient use of resources. American Airlines recently reported an investment of $400 million to upgrade its entire fleet with GPS navigation systems to operate more efficiently:
“I think we are going to save several thousand pounds of fuel on this one flight,” he said.
And that could mean more cost savings for American, which spent $9 billion on jet fuel in 2008, if it is allowed more trans-Atlantic flights that use the new technology. The carrier has said it wants to save 120 million gallons of fuel and reduce carbon emissions by 2.5 billion pounds this year.
Flight 63 will use an optimized route determined by GPS, not a route predetermined by air traffic controllers. GPS lets controllers track a plane all the way across the Atlantic, even when it’s out of radar range, unlike the Air France plane that disappeared from radar last week. GPS would help maintain appropriate separation among planes.
In addition to the cost savings and reduced environmental impact, GPS will help avoid tragedies like the disappearance of the Air France flight over the Atlantic.
There are many ways to customize the map you use with your RavTrack PC vehicle tracking program. RavTrack PC uses any bitmap image, scanned map, jpeg photo, or geotiff file as the base-map to display vehicle location. Simply load your image/map into the calibration tool (mapmanger), and then calibrate 3 points with known latitude and longitude and the map is ready to use. Note: .geotiff files are already have their calibration embedded into them so they do not need to be calibrated for use with RavTrack PC.
Your customization options are:
Add custom icons to the map file
Importing Points of Interest (POIs) and identifying them on the map.
Import and overlaying ESRI shape files.
Manually place Points of Interest (POIs) on the map and label them.
Draw colored line, poly-shapes, ovals, circles, rectangles, and squares on the map.
Once the map is calibrated, you can import custom icons right into the emap file.
1. Adding Custom Icons on the map
All icons in RavTrack PC are actually small .jpg of .bmp files which are loaded into the .maplib file and given a name. By naming the icon, you are able to assign it to tracked vehicles/objects or simply place it on the map as a POI. As a POI, you are able to create alert rules to notify the operator when vehicle get too close or too far away from the POI.
To import a custom icon made as a .jpg of .bmp file, first open the map file you would like the icons to be associated with. Note, RavTrack PC comes with a rich set of default icons stored in the standardicons.maplib file, but you may load your own custom icons into any .maplib map file or load them into the standardicons.maplib file and have them available to all maps.
To open and edit the .maplib file, select Tools > Map Creation Tool from the RavTrack PC main screen. This will open the GpsToolsStudio from Franson, which is the tool used to calibrate maps and load icons. Load the .maplib file you wish to insert you custom icons into, and the choose Icons > New Icon to import the icon craphic into the map. Don’t forget to save your .maplib file once the icon is imported and named.
2. Importing Points of Interest (POIs) and identifying them on the map.
RavTrack PC is an exceptional vehicle tracking software program. It excels at locating tracked vehicles, alerting the operator of special conditions, and presenting a complex AVL system in a very user-friendly manor. But, it is not as powerful as some other program are in the area of GIS, route planning, and map manipulation. The good news is, that most progams can export in various standard file formats, and RavTrack can import data in a number of different format. This allows you to do complex mapping and planning using any number of mapping tools, and then import your waypoints and tracks into RavTrack PC.
A common task is to plan an event such as a road-rally, marathon, or race. Ozi Explorer and Global Mapper are just a couple very powerful programs that a user can create routes and place waypoints on their maps. Once your plan is complete, save the waypoints in either an Ozi .wpt waypoint file, or in Garmin’s .gpx file format. From RavTrack PC, select File > Import Tracks, Plots, Waypoints from the main screen. When using the .gps file format, you must choose the “Import as POI” option to put the waypoints onto the map’s POI layer.
3. Import and overlaying ESRI shape files.
RavTrack PC can import some ESRI shape files and overlay them on the map image. Certain large files do not import but most ESRI shape files less than a few MB seem to load and display properly. From RavTrack PC, select File > ESRI FIles… from the main screen. Select your ESRI shape file to import it onto the map.
The default settings for the ESRI shape import files is configured with the File > Program Properties > ESRI Data.
4. Manually place Points of Interest (POIs) on the map and label them.
You may place any icon at any location on the map as a Point of Interest. To do so, select File > Drawing Tools. This will bring up the drawing toolkit.
Select “Point of Interest” as the type of object to draw. Then select the name of the icon you wish to place on the map. Once selected, click on the location on the map that you would like the POI placed. Once you click on the map, a box will pop-up so you can assign the POI a name such as “Joes House”. Once you have placed all the POIs on the map, they may then be used in the Alert Rules you create.
You may also turn the POI layer of the map on or off. On the top of the main RavTrack PC main screen is a drop-down box, where you can select which layers are visible on the map.
View DropDown
5. Draw colored line, poly-shapes, ovals, circles, rectangles, and squares on the map.
Using the Drawing Toolkit, you may place graphics on your map at any location. To do so, select File > Drawing Tools. This will bring up the drawing toolkit. Select the Map Graphics layer, select your shape and the color of the shape, and then draw it on the map. When drawing polygons, press the enter key when done drawing.
Your Raveon RavTrack PCGPS Tracking System can send “Rule Alert Messages” via email when triggered by a GPS tracking rule. GPS tracking Rules may be based upon vehicle speed, proximity, idle time, geo-fences, and many other conditions. When a rule alert is triggered, the rule alert messages may be sent to any email address.
Often, users wish to send an alert to a mobile device using Short Messaging Services (SMS). Cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones, and many other mobile communication devices can receive SMS messages. And sending a Rule Alert Message to them is very simple.
To send a GPS tracking alert from RavTrack PC (Raveon’s GPS tracking software), configure the “mail to” address to send the alert message to, to the mobile-devices wireless carrier’s email server, using the telephone number of the mobile device as the email address. Different wireless carriers use different email address formatting (See list below), but in general, the email address will be something like:
760-555-1212@txt.att.net where 760-555-1212 is the telephone number of the subscriber.
The domain listed after the @ sign depends upon the carrier, and the list below shows some common carriers and their email domain names.
Remember, SMS is a short-message service, and the carrier may break long messages up into multiple short messages. SMS is often not free, and the users of SMS must pay a per-message fee. The recipient of the GPS tracking alert SMS may be billed by the wireless carrier for each alert message received.
The email server and address that the Rule Alerts are emailed to is configured in RavTrack PC by selecting FILE>PROGRAM PROPERTIES and then clicking on the “SERVERS” tab. On the Servers tab, you will see the boxes to fill-in the email address and email server information.
One area where GPS technology will see greater improvements is in how it is used within large buildings and other interior spaces. Currently, it is difficult to receive GPS signals through walls and structures, but this reach can be improved with GPS repeaters and other ground-based systems. One can imagine how useful this might be in locating company personnel within a corporate office building, hospital, etc. In addition to 
I was reading this article earlier today about how a 
Many companies are starting to see the benefits of tracking their fleets with GPS-based solutions in terms of fuel cost savings and more efficient route planning. With GPS, you can constantly optimize your routes, which will add directly to the bottom line over time through more efficient use of resources. American Airlines recently reported an investment of $400 million to 
