Everyone knows what it is like to be driving through a strange part of town or to be driving your family around on vacation and suddenly realize that they are lost. Imagine you are driving a school group around in a giant 15 passenger van rental in Atlanta with everyone inside hungry, tired from traveling and only wanting to get out of the van. Now imagine that you are supposed to be heading east on a highway and you just realized you’ve gone west for an hour, what exactly are you supposed to do.

First and easiest would be to call the passenger van rental Atlanta facility where you got the vehicle from. They should be able to figure out about where you are and how you need to get to where you want to be, however they aren’t always going to be able to help.

Of course there is always the go back the way you came in order to get back to the exit that you were supposed to take or go in the direction you wanted to go. I don’t believe however that this is your best bet, today many rental facilities offer one of two things, either a system call OnStar or you can get a GPS unit in your car. I know that this seems like a stupid idea, because you never know when you might get lost when you are on vacation; however it is always smart to preempt things like getting lost that could ruin an entire day of your trip.

One time when my family was driving to the beach through South Carolina my father decided to take a different route because he had a map of the state and wanted to get down to the beach as fast as possible . The problem was that his map was so “zoomed out” that the road that we were supposed to take was right on top of three other roads. Rather than pull over and try to ask for directions to figure out if we were going the correct direction he drove past three gas stations and a grocery store. It took thirty minutes for him to realize that he had taken the worst of the three roads that he could have taken.

The moral of the story is that if you need to know where you are going while you are on vacation let’s just say in Georgia, go to a monthly car rental in Atlanta, GA facility and make sure that the vehicle you get comes complete with a navigation system.

Summer is always the season for hurricanes in the South East United States and this year is no exception. Although it has been nowhere near as bad as the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, reports of hurricanes are beginning to become more frequent.

Recently, Hurricane Dolly hit Texas, making landfall at South Padre Island. After many bad hurricane seasons, most residents of these areas are leaving little up to chance and have been over preparing. One way to be prepared for a hurricane is to use a car transport company to ship your valuable automobile up North, out of the storm’s path. This is because automobiles on the streets or even in garages are likely to get severely damaged by hurricanes. Once a window breaks and the inside becomes soaked, it takes days to weeks to dry out and become functional again. Never mind the fact that the car will probably always smell like the ocean or something foul. Save yourself the worry by using a Car shipping service, and you will see it is often worth the effort in the long run.

Luckily however, Hurricane Dolly has not been as damaging of a storm as hurricanes past. 100mph winds have caused damage and downed power lines, and torrential rains have caused flooding, but overall the storm has not been a record breaker. In Corpus Christi Texas, hurricane warnings were lifted and it was downgraded to a tropical storm. This is a good sign for home owners, as it means their property will likely survive with minimal damage.

Over preparing when it comes to hurricanes is always the smartest move though. Although it can be a hassle, expensive, and time consuming, not taking precautions like boarding windows or using sand bags, can really hurt you if you live in a hurricane zone. It just takes a window or two to break, or the absence of sandbags to cause hundreds to thousands of dollars of damage, not to mention hours of work.

A GPS tracking unit is a device that uses the Global Positioning System to determine the precise location of a vehicle, person, or other asset to which it is attached and to record the position of the asset at regular intervals. The recorded location data can be stored within the tracking unit, or it may be transmitted to a central location data base, or internet-connected computer, using a cellular (GPRS), radio, or satellite modem embedded in the unit. This allows the asset's location to be displayed against a map backdrop either in real-time or when analysing the track later, using customized software. Such systems are not new; amateur radio operators have been operating their free GPS based nationwide realtime Automatic Position Reporting System since 1982.

Data loggers

A GPS logger simply logs the position of the device at regular intervals in its internal memory. Modern GPS loggers have either a memory card slot, or internal flash memory and a USB port. Some act as a USB flash drive. This allows downloading of the data for further analysis in a computer.

These kind of devices are most suited for use by sport enthusiasts: They carry it while practicing an outdoors sport, e.g. jogging or backpacking. When they return home, they download the data to a computer, to calculate the length and duration of the trip, or to overimpose their paths over a map with the aid of GIS software. GPS devices are also integral tools in geocaching.

In the sport of gliding, competitors are sent to fly over closed circuit tasks of hundreds of kilometres. GPS loggers are used to prove that the competitors completed the task and stayed away from controlled airspace. The data stored over many hours in the loggers is downloaded after the flight is completed and is analyzed by computing the start and finish times so determining the fastest competitors.

In some Private Investigation cases, these data loggers are used to keep track of the vehicle or the fleet vehicle. The reason for using this device is so that a PI will not have to follow the target so closely and always has a backup source of data.