Categories: Vehicle Tracking

Vehicle Tracking Basics

Basic Instructions On Using A Web Based Vehicle Tracking System. (Video)

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Vehicle Tracking Basics.

Hello there and welcome.
I’m Nick from Radphone, and in this video, I’ll be giving you a basic introduction to how vehicle tracking works…

This presentation is based around a typical web based tracking system.

Once we log in to the site, we’re presented with the default map display and a selection area on the left where we can choose the items we want to look at.

You’ll notice that there are different types of item we can select… Vehicles, which are self explanatory… Assets, which might include thigs like trailers… and POI’s or “points of interest”, which we’ll take a look at another time.

Anyway for now, we’ll just select a group of vehicles to look at.

Just click on “select group”.

If you’re a large user, you’d probably split vehicles into seperate sub-groups, like management, sales, service, etc. If that’s the case, then you’ll need to further select a sub-group.

Once that’s done, the website will list all the vehicles the selected group.

You’ll also see on the listing, the latest up to date information alongside each vehicle.

The date and time of last contact from the unit.
Assuming that today’s the 5th, you might notice that some of the these dates are a couple of weeks out of date. That’s because these particular vehicles are gritters.
When they’re not in use for long periods of time, they have a switch which isolates the whole electrical system… which includes the supply for the tracker.
In a regular vehicle the unit will report in every hour while it’s parked.
The drain on the vehicle battery from these tracking units is minimal. A typical vehicle battery will last several weeks with the tracker running.

The current location,or address is also displayed.

The icon underneath the vehicle shows the current status. As you can see all of these vehicles are displaying a “P”, indicating that they’re parked up.

There’ also a scroll bar to access vehicles further down the list.

Driver identification is available as an option.

Drivers are issued with personal “Dallas Keys”.
They then “log on” when they use a vehicle.
This means that individual driver journeys can be monitored independantly from vehicle journeys.

Right, let’s take a look at where this vehicle actually is on a map.
Just click on the vehicle display box…

And the map automatically zooms in to show the location.

If we want to view several vehicles at once.

We just click on the ones we want to see.

And as we click on them…

The map automatically expands or zooms out to display the vehicles we’ve chosen.

Now, this is all very impressive.
It might be very nice to know where this red van is right now…

And where the rest of the fleet is…

but the real power in tracking, or fleet management, lies in the ability to create or run what we call… “reports”.

So let’s take a closer look at reports.

All the tracking data collected from vehicles in the fleet can be filtered and presented in different ways.

Each of these filters is a different type of report.

As you can see, there are quite a few reports available on this particular system.

Want to know if and when a restricted vehicle was used outside working hours?

There’s a report for it!

Extra reports can be added to the system as and when the need arises.

If you need a different type of report.

One that’s not listed.

It can be custom designed and added to the system.

Right, let’s take a look at a couple of reports.

We’ll start with a straightforward “journey” report for the red van.

Just click on the gps journey report icon.

And we’re taken to this page.

Now we just need to set the parameters for the journey report.

Don’t worry, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

First we select the vehicle on the left that we want to generate the journey report for.

We’ve already selected the red van…

Second, we need to select the dates we want the report generated for…

We’ll just go for the quick option and see where the van went yesterday.

And third… we select what format we want the report in.

We can display it straight onto the computer screen inside our browser…

We can download it as a pdf.

Or we can download a csv file if we want to manipulate the data in a spreadsheet.

We’ll just display it straight onto the computer screen for now.

So this is where we can view the report we’ve just generated.

This confirms that we’ve generated a report for yesterday, the 5th.

And we can see here that yesterday, this vehicle made 12 journeys totalling 1hour, 20 minutes and 14 seconds.

The vehicle was idle for 22 seconds… that’s the engine running but vehicle not moving.

And it travelled just over 15 miles.

Now we can look at a detailed report or view the journey as a snail trail on a map.

So, we’ll look at a detailed report, listing all the journeys…

Here we have a list of all the journeys made… with start and end times, locations and maximum speed achieved…

We could take a look at all 12 journeys on a map, but that could get a bit messy.

So we’ll just take a look at this single journey.

Up pops the journey shown on a map…

This is where the journey started…

And this is where it ended.

Lets take a quick look at another report…

We’ll try the “late start” report.

This report displays a list of start times and automatically includes all the vehicles in the group.

There are boxes with different starting times. Listed here are Vehicles that started up before 7:30…

Vehicles that started after 7:30 but before 8 am.

Vehicles that started between 8 and 3:30…

vehicles that started moving between 8:30 and 9.

And all the lucky late starters after 9 am.

This makes you wonder why white van drivers have such a poor reputation.
We can see that this white van man is a keen worker keen, He started first… before 7:30.

The red van, however, started sometime after 8:30.

Well, I think we’ll wrap it up there for now.

Again, this is Nick from Radphone and thanks for watching.

I do hope you’ve found this video helpful.

More on GPS Vehicle Tracking.

Radphone

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