XGate Vessel Tracking and GPS Repeater

XGate's vessel tracking allows vessels and managers to keep track of their assets easily with no need  to purchase expensive third party hardware.   Use  existing GPS and communication equipment to send tracking reports back to the office.  No additional hardware needs to be purchased, added or interfaced to track vessels.

The vessel tracking software consists of three software components:

• GPS repeater
• Tracking software
• Position reporter

The GPS Repeater

The GPS repeater software built into XGate allows XGate to read the GPS NMEA data from a real COM port on your PC and then pass on the unmodified data to up to two virtual COM ports.  This features allows XGate's vessel tracking software to coexist with existing navigation software without the need to add a second serial port or GPS to the system.  After configuring the GPS repeater in XGate, navigational software such as The Captain, Nobeltec, MaxSea, etc can be configured to read the GPS data off a virtual COM port created by XGate.  As far as the navigation software is concerned the virtual COM port is indistinguishable from a the original physical port.  Both XGate and 2 additional navigation applications can share the same GPS at the same time.

Tracking Software

XGate can report positions in one of 3 ways:

• E-Mail headers
• Reported to a central database with every e-mail session
• Automatically on a schedule

When enabled XGate's position reporting is done with every e-mail session.  The user can configure XGate to read the GPS and send the vessel's position in the header of every sent e-mail.  E-Mail recipients can examine the e-mail headers to know  the vessel's exact position and the time  when the e-mail was sent.

Additionally, a vessel's XGate can be configured as part of a fleet.  In this configuration reports are sent to a central server which keeps track of vessel positions for all vessels configured for the fleet.  Since position reports are sent with every e-mail session, the user can manually determine when to update his positions in the central database.  The vessel's GPS time, position, course, speed and selected  weather parameters are sent with every position report. 

At any time the vessel or the office can request to view positions for all the vessels in a fleet.  This operation is much like AIS on a global scale using satellite phones instead of VHF.

Finally, the user can configure XGate to send position reports on a schedule.  Not only are positions sent on the schedule, but an entire e-mail session is also done during the session. In this mode vessel crew can send an e-mail and then walk away from the computer. XGate's automatic scheduler will send the e-mail and then receive any e-mails on the server which are pending.  The crew can, at a later time, check their e-mail without having to do a manual connection.  In this mode XGate works much like the older style 'always on' satellite systems such as Inmarsat-C and Orbcomm.

Reporting

Vessels can request position reports for their vessel and any other vessel in their fleet on demand.  Once the request is made the server processes the requested position report and sends it back to the vessel in a compact form.  The report can then be viewed off line on the vessel using one of a number of different reporters.   Unlike other vessel tracking systems, no expensive web browsing is needed to view the tracks.  The tracks are viewed off line on the vessel without consuming valuable air time.

Following are screen shots taken from different reporting packages available with XGate.  The free Yotreps reported is included with the XGate software.   Users wanting higher resolution or wanting to overlay weather charts over the tracks can use OCENS GRIB Explorer or Xaxero Windplot.

Users wanting to display their vessel position on their personal website can do so by referencing a URL that looks like the following:

http://map.gmn-usa.com/cgi-bin/plotpos.pl?fleet=zephyrus&user=zephyrus&pw=ushuaia&x=300&y=300&zoom=40

where

• fleet is the name of the fleet the vessel is assigned.
• user is the name assigned to the vessel
• pw is the password for the fleet
• x is the width in pixels for the image to be created
• y is the height in pixels of the image
• zoom is the width in degrees of the image chart

For an example of the use of this URL, go to the  tracked vessels page