The Vehicle Tracking Project
The BookBus tracking is an example of telemetry, in other words, collecting information at a distance.
The location of the bus is monitored by a Quartix tracking device on board the vehicle. This has a Rockwell GPS receiver which uses information from GPS satellites to calculate exactly where the bus is at any moment. For more about how this works, see the pass notes on GPS
This information is compressed and then sent out to the Quartix data centre over the Orange mobile phone network. Computers at the data centre process the information into useable formats, such as daily and weekly reports which are sent out by email.
Users can also log in over the world wide web and access archived data - such as the details of the bus's movements on any particular day in the past. They can view route maps of journeys made, zooming in from national down to street level as required, and they can access up to the minute information about where the bus is, what speed it is doing, and which direction it is heading in.