Page 38: of Marine News Magazine (December 2014)

TECHNOLOGYing myself and the general manager of Lomax?s departure for outside work.? For inland waterways users, the system can pay for itself quickly. In one case, an inland tug company was paying taxes based on fuel burned inside of certain states. Dan Webb, gplink?s Manager, told MarineNews in November, ?Their accounting department was inaccurately, manu- ally calculating these fees based on educated guesses. gp-link created a downloadable report that began calculating fuel burn when their vessel(s) crossed into the state, and stopped when they exited. The gplink system quickly dem- onstrated that, not only was the tug company overpaying, they were spending 50 hours a month creating reports that could be made available with three clicks.? Communicating the Good News gplink uses data services on the AT&T GSM Cellular network and/or its GSM roaming partners as the primary channel and defaults to Iridium if GSM is not available. Through these connections, it is possible to provide near real-time reporting of a vessels GPS position, speed and heading, engine metrics and monitoring, sensor monitor-ing, and on-board geofencing. The system also employs a least cost routing algorithm to insure that each packet is transmitted over the most cost effective network. The gplink MTU (Mobile Transmitting Unit ? Trans- ceiver) uses the Short Burst Data (SBD) services on the Iridium satellite network as the secondary mode. The Irid- December 201438 MNMN Dec14 Layout 32-49.indd 38MN Dec14 Layout 32-49.indd 3811/25/2014 11:08:27 AM11/25/2014 11:08:27 AM