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When the USAFE 31st Fighter Wing Maintenance Squadron at the USAF Air Base in Aviano, Italy faced the challenge of efficiently managing its airport ground equipment, Btracking answered the call with a tailored solution.
There were two key specifications.
First, establish a reliable method for tracking and swiftly locating ground equipment. The base has a number of locations for parking ground equipment. It was efficient for ground equipment to be left in the nearest parking area when not in use, but this was making it difficult to quickly locate specific equipment when it was needed.
Second, USAF Aviano sought an airport asset management system capable of instantly recognizing when parked equipment began to move, then delivering high location reporting frequency while the equipment was moving. This was especially important for equipment being moved off-base.
For unpowered equipment such as cargo trailers which are towed by ground vehicles, Btracking deployed its BSX400 Solar Hybrid Rechargeable GPS Trackers.
Renowned for an extended operational lifespan, these devices feature a solar-rechargeable battery that can sustain months of location reporting on a single charge, providing more frequent data for longer periods compared with other airport asset management devices in the market today. Furthermore, these highly efficient trackers requiring only a few hours of sunlight daily to maintain a full charge, as the large 10.6Ah exceeds industry standards for temperature extremes and is capable of more than 4000 life cycles. Equipped with highly sensitive movement detection capabilities, the BSX400 was programmed to immediately adjust to high its reporting frequency upon movement.
One of the test applications involving the BSX400 Solar Hybrid Rechargeable Tracker saw USAF Aviano use the tracker to monitor a cargo shipment from Aviano to Morocco via truck and then via ship across the Mediterranean Sea. The location frequency was set to 1 minute and the ship was far from shore but the tracker reported flawlessly for the entire voyage. There were a couple exceptions where the ship was too far from a cell tower on shore to send real time location reports for several hours. In these situations, the tracker switched to “store and forward” mode, storing all the locations in memory, then sending all accumulated location reports immediately once in range of a cell network.
(The BSX400 can connect to a ship’s network (Zigbee or BLE) and send location reports in real time via the ship’s satellite communications. A less expensive alternative solution for tracking shipments at sea is to use our BLE IoT Tags with an access point on the ship that sends location data from all the BLE tags.)
For powered equipment, and for trailers that may be connected to vehicle power when in motion, the BSX400 also emerged as the preferred solution. This versatile solar hybrid tracker can be connected to machine power as well, allowing the tracker to function as a high reporting frequency vehicle tracker when on power, and rapidly recharge its battery. When trailers and machines are parked and off power, the tracker can report for months with no sunlight, and stay fully charged with just a few hours of sunlight per day.
Please give us a call at 866-233-0953, email [email protected] or use our contact form to discuss our tailored solutions for tracking powered and non-powered equipment at airports, ports and yard facilities, and for tracking containers and shipments at sea. Never hesitate to reach out if you have questions about our airport asset management or any other tracking solutions.
Btracking is proud to support our Armed Forces.
