Faraday cages

Hi Guys, Just to use my tuppence worth. A car isn't a faraday cage. Take any hand held device used inside the vehicle like a hand held amateur radio, PMR 446, a mobile telephone, gatso detectors, a gps satellite detector and your on glass antenna for your radio, is inside as well. All of these work within the vehicle, so any signal that can be received can be transmitted. A car isn't an effective faraday cage atall.

All this business about introducing Darlings system is all hyped up. There isn't a cat in hells chance in it taking off as there's far too much in liberty stakes alone, never mind how and who will run it and incidentally at what cost to us the public. There 's no doubt that we all agree the roads are filling up rapidly but surely to try and resolve the problem short term the guverment should resort to sorting out the public transport sectors and addressing putting freight back on the rails and sea, a job they should have solved years ago, but as all parties do they've faffed and farted about instead of addressing the real problems correctly and positively. Darling's got as much chance as this working as I have platting fog. This guverment needs to get real. Another note, just wonder how much Mr Darling got paid for thinking this one up? Dave

Reply to
Dave Piggin
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One thing which no one seems to have bothered mentioning, the GPS system is a US military system, and they can introduce errors in it whenever they please. What happens to the Darling system next time the US military put an error in, and all cars will be seen to be driving along rivers, and through fields etc?

Reply to
SimonJ

it is true, the US Military control ALL the gps satellites around the earth at this moment in time, and if one cold day they feel like turning them all off, there is not a thing we (and the rest of the world) can do about it.

however, europe is planning to send up its own gps satellites shortly, not sure when, or how many though.

Reply to
Bigstoo

i tell a lie. 2008 (thats the year we get them, not how many!!)

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Reply to
Bigstoo

Would a river or field cost less or more than the M4 in rush hour traffic? Maybe you could argue that you were driving from London to Bristol in fields and rivers rather than on the motorway. David

Reply to
DavidM

It's not "they" that need to sort out public transport/rail freight, it's us. We demand our goods next day, at the cheapest cost and this cannot be done using rail. We need to change our expectations of an instant lifestyle. If our mates car is off the road for some reason we need to offer to help out (that includes employers too), if their washing machine is on the blink we need to offer assistance. We need to mix industrial/retail development with residential (and be prepared to accept invonvenience as a result) to avoid commuting to work. And so on........

But it ain't going to happen, until we're forced to, not by "them", but by us realising we can't go on as we are.

Just my 2p's worth

Richard

Reply to
beamendsltd

Another interesting by product of this technology will be the ability to know what speed you were travelling at any given point on any given road at any given time. Plenty of speeding fines automatically issued. Issues to resolve will be over what distance a speeding fine will be calculated? For example, if you were to drive at 80mph along the entire length of a motorway (highly unlikely on todays congested roads), would that be one speeding fine or many thousands? Could be banned before reaching the first junction!! Then there is the problem that banned drivers will not generate revenue. Martin

Reply to
Martin Coombs

A GPS needs to be in a position where it can get decent line of sight to the satellites, that's the biggest problem. You can get GPS bugging devices that you can clap on a car but they tend not to work very well, and require a particularly sensitive GPS built to work from satellite signals reflected from the ground. Any GPS-based tracking device the government force us to use would have to be either expensive to work on similar lines, or would have to have external aerials or be displayed prominently. If they want a tamper-proof black box then it would have to be displayed prominently behind non-heated glass windows or covered entirely by plastic parts of the car in a prominent position, e.g. inside the bumpers. Even then it would be at a disadvantage in cities where satellite signals are often weak, blocked by buildings and swamped with other noise.

I think we can forget the GPS-based systems, it's just a smokescreen. It'll be roadside cameras or nothing as they already have the technology and can tie it in with speeding, insurance dodging and tax dodging all based on proven technology but will push the insurance dodging angle with lurid stories of mown-down kiddies and other save-the-fluffy-bunny stuff.

Unfortunately I don't think the civil liberties issues wash with most of the population, they're too dumb to worry about it and believe the bogus justification. A dash of terrorism here, a bit of insurance dodging there, a touch of avoiding traffic jams as a garnish and most people will roll over. I get tired of hearing "what have you got to hide", especially from people who then refuse to let me rifle through their pockets, handbags and bedroom drawers.

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Eloquantly put on both points.

Regards. Mark.

Reply to
MVP

Unfortunately I think I know a system that will bypass a lot of this problems and mentioned as much to one of my colleagues who is unfortunately doing the technology eval for it.

There's no difficulty at all rigging a beacon on every road intersection and just seeing which cars pass which beacons. The infrastructure largely exists - you use lamp posts to mount the things and the uplink's the easy bit. Don't have the cars do anything other than broadcast an identifier, or if you're feeling sneaky rig it for challenge/response so that you can secure the ID beacon.

Would be a hell of a lot cheaper, piece of piss to rig (IR will pass through even heated windscreens!) and would still tell you which cars are using which roads and when without needing to track the car down to the meter. It will also give you measured distance calculations, so will act as a speed trap in the same manner as SPECS does now.

Yes - I do do this stuff for a living - specifically, try and come up with solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems. Sorry.

P.

Reply to
Paul Brown

Still doesn't get round the problem of someone who does not have one affixed to the vehicle or has one that is faulty, and the system is certainly not tamper proof.

Most likely we will see more of what Red Ken has already doen in London, effectively a tax on using city centres, but without the incentive of reduced fuel duty or no road fund licence.

Reply to
Larry

and all cars will be seen to be driving along rivers, and

Some of us do that anyway.... TonyB

Reply to
TonyB

I'm amazed that everyone here is talking as though this is some sort of future technology. The haulage industry has been using it for some years. "Control" just types in the ID of the truck and up pops a map showing where it is, what speed its doing etc. With that info driving hours, distance travelled, next-service due etc is easily calculated - tying in the vehicles CAN bus could even give you the weight from the self-weighing equipment increasingly being fitted, way-points could be checked to see if deliveries have been made etc.

The system interrogates the vehicle periodocally, so if a transmitter becomes defective and warning can be raised - it would be easy to tie this into an automated system to telephone/write to the registered keeper telling them to get it fix in x days or get an automatic fine.

The technology exists and is being used - no need for road side equipment or cameras. Whether it's a good idea or not is another issue though - personaly I think not.

Richard

Reply to
beamendsltd

You seem to be missing the point; with the type of system that you are describing small position errors or some outages are not a serious problem.

However, a position error due to poor view of the satellites that put you on the expensive motorway rather than the cheap minor road running alongside would have serious cost implications.

How long an outage do you accept before the system logs it as an error? Where was the vehicle? How much do you charge it?

The whole thing is fraught with errors, as well as being open to major fraud.

Regards Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

My vehicle tracking system sounded a dangerous driving alert the other day. I was doing 144 mph in our office car park. Even better, I was sat at my desk with the keys in my pocket....

The GPS had gone wobbly and jumped me across Barnsley and back in 18 seconds.

Reply to
Tim Hobbs

That could be verified by sanity checking - implausible data could be run through an expert system (as used very efftively by insurance companies), and in the worst case simply generate an error for human intervention. How that should be dealt with is a political matter, not technological.

Again, that's politics.

All systems are open to fraud - we accept that to some extent in all our daily lives. At what point is becomes unacceptable is again a political (social?) judgement.

As I said earlier, I don't think the whole idea is a Good Thing at all, but it can be done. I suspect it would end up costing, in admin terms, far more than its benefits - just like parking meters!.

Richard

Reply to
beamendsltd

Oh yes it does... You just take the same technology used by traffic light cameras to sense the presence of a vehicle. If the beacon doesn't have a signal and there is a vehicle there, you photograph it and issue a fixed penalty.

Reply to
Tim Hobbs

How can you sanity check, say a 100m error, when a road exists at that location??

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

GPS systems are just too fragile for this type of use, it takes very little to screen or jam a gps receiver.

For instance some radio receivers when tuned to specific frequencies will jam a gps. So just tune to your favourite local radio station and hey presto the gps stops working.

Driving in steep valleys or between high buildings is enough to reduce the visibility of satellites such that significant position errors result.

These problems are enough to make gps road pricing a very poor option.

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

On or around Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0100, "Jeff" enlightened us thusly:

if the system shows you travelling on a minor road, then jumping across to the motorway where no junction exists, then jumping back again...

Reply to
Austin Shackles

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