Recommendations Needed Construction Vehicles & Timecards

[Montauk]

I own a construction business and have a couple of vehicles & a couple of crews. We are a 90% Mac shop running OS 10.3.8 & Virtual PC v7 with Windows XP.

My need is to track & retrieve the following information (not in realtime);
- Vehicle / Crew location(s)
- Timecards for the guys

My thought is to give each vehicle or crew a handheld unit each day and to download the info each night.
The unit would have to be somewhat rugged & be able to run on a charge for a full day (12 to 16 hours).

What are your thoughts and/or recommendations?

[Skippy]

There are a couple of options, really. You could get a datalogger like one of these:

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/deluo-black-box.php
http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/delorme-blue-logger.php

You may find that the GPS works OK when it's in the glovebox or else find a place to install it in the vehicle. These have BlueTooth so you can hard wire them into the vehicle and download the data using a BT enabled PC without touching the boxes.

Your employees won't be able to interact with either of these boxes though, it will just log their location, speed and the time.

The other alternative is the Geko 201 (don't get the Geko 101 because you can't connect it to a PC or Mac).

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/garmingeko.php

Your employees can leave the Geko running and it will log their position and they can also use it to mark waypoints (which records location and time) for events like clocking on/off.

Battery life is claimed to be 12 hours on two alkaline batteries, rechargable ones are an option but they don't last as long. I am pretty sure you can get a car kit and connect it to the power in the van/truck though. I don't think there are many GPS units (Bluetooth or handheld) which last more than about 12 hours continuous.

The Garmin GPS units are <£100 and fairly robust. I don't know how long they will last before getting broken/lost/stolen if your employees decide they don't like being tracked though. :x

On the Mac, there are a couple of programs which will download the tracklog and waypoints from the GPS but I don't know how good they are. Ideally, you want a program which will overlay the tracklog and waypoints on a map.

For the PC, you could get Garmin's Mapsource City Select Europe which will give you a very detailed map of the UK and Europe and overlay the tracks and waypoints. Also consider Memory Map, Fugawi or Ozi Explorer (all PC, Fugawi and Ozi have demo versions available).

There are cheap/free programs around, but the expensive part of the software is the map data to overlay your tracks/waypoints onto.

I don't know how well these run under virtual PC.

Good luck!
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