M7 Heatsinking and Duty Cycle
The M7 transceiver has a 5-watt RF power output rating. In a typical application the units is in Standby or Receive mode most of the time. A small fraction of the time, it is transmitting. But when it transmits, the…
Connecting the M7 to a Lowrance display
The M7 GX series of GPS transponders may be directly connected to a Lowrance Globalmap 540C or a Globalmap 840C navigation display. When connected, the Lowrance display map will show the location of the vehicle it is in PLUS the…
Trimble Copernicus GPS Receiver
Internal to Raveon's M7 series of GPS transponders is a GPS receiver module made by Trimble. It is their Copernicus II GPS receiver module. Many of the M7's performance specifications are driven by the use of this receiver module. The Copernicus…
TDMA Time Slots (Multiplexing Time Division)
Raveon's M7-GX AVL transceiver uses a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocol to transmit position, status, and data over the air. TDMA protocols greatly increase the available channel bandwidth but they require more system planning than conventional carrier-sense methods. With a TDMA…
Creating and Adding Maps to RavTrack PC
Creating and Finding Map Images All GPS Tracking software programs need some source of image files to overlay the position of the things being tracked. The Internet provides a rich source of map images, and this page identifies some of the better…
M7 Firmware Updating
Overview This Technical Brief describes how to upload firmware into the RV-M7 transceiver. The RV-M7 series transceivers utilize a Phillips ARM-based Microprocessor with internal FLASH memory. All RV-M7-GX series transceiver use an LPC2136 processor, which has 256kB of flash memory.…
M7 I/O Connections
The M7's I/O Connector On the front of the M7 series of transponders, is an Input / output (I/O) connector used to configure the unit. This I/O connector supports RS232 serial data (422 optionally), as well as digital input and…
The $PRAVE Message Format
Overview GPS tracking over-the-air position/status messages that the GPS transceiver and the Atlas Personal Locator may receive are sent out the serial port using Raveon’s tracking message format called the $PRAVE message. The $PRAVE message is structured like NMEA messages,…
Quick Updating of RavTrack PC 2.3 to 2.7
It is possible to upgrade RavTrack PC from version 2.3 - 2.6 to version 2.7 by simply replacing the RavTrackPC.exe file in the program directory on your computer. This avoids having to perform a full re-install of the RavTrack PC software…
About This GPS Tracking Blog
This site is a web log for information about Raveon's Real-Time GPS Tracking system called RavTrack. It is a repository full of usefull information about GPS tracking technology, and particularily real-time tracking using VHF/UHF radio technology. Users of Raveon's GPS…