Car thieves had better polish their resumes. Their career of choice may become a memory when a new satellite communication device that can track a stolen car in near real time — even before the owner finds out the car is gone — hits the market.
The new technology, which allows direct and almost instantaneous communication between a central monitoring station and remote assets such as cars, power lines, and vending machines, was developed by SatSmart Ltd., a start-up at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology business incubator company. SatSmart developed a compact unit that creates a global, two-way communication pipeline that bypasses the Internet or other phone lines currently used with standard satellite-based monitoring systems, eliminating the resulting delays of minutes or hours in receiving messages.
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Compared to competing anti-auto theft devices, for example, SatSmart does not require the owner to report the theft, avoiding delays, and allows the car to be tracked anywhere, instead of only within an urban response area. In addition to tracking stolen cars and power lines, the two-way data transmission opens a wide range of applications including monitoring pipelines in remote locations, providing instant leak alerts; supervising far-flung cargo; monitoring vending machines; monitoring power lines, signaling electrical failure; finding lost trekkers or sea craft; and residential and commercial security.
“With organizations operating globally, with branches and equipment spread out over continents, there’s a growing need for instantaneous, low cost monitoring,” says Zvi David, SatSmart chief executive officer. “This is especially true in outlying areas where equipment such as pipelines, pumps and electricity transformers may be located far from roads and transportation networks.”
While satellite communication is mainly valued for its ability to transmit large streams of information for telephone, radio and television (broadband uses), satellites are also increasingly needed for transmitting small — but critical — data streams from remote locations (narrowband uses). In contrast to broadband applications that require large antennae and complex signal processing equipment, narrowband applications can use extremely compact antennae and small receiving units. But the downside of existing narrowband systems is that they funnel data from a satellite to a central gateway and thence through the Internet or other phone line to a monitoring station, slowing the process down considerably, in some cases by hours. The SatSmart modem eliminates these delays with a small unit that currently sends data through the gateway but will soon allow direct communication from remote sites to the satellite and from the satellite directly to the customer’s monitoring station, allowing messages to be delivered in seconds. The signals travel from the modem to one of the low-orbit satellite communication providers, which then relays it to the intended recipient modem. The Smart 2000 unit, which according to SatSmart costs less than existing satellite modems, combines a small internal antenna with data processing and storage and is fully programmable. The technology involved is patent pending.
The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the country’s premier scientific and technological center for applied research and education. It commands a worldwide reputation for its pioneering work in communications, electronics, computer science, biotechnology, water-resource management, materials engineering, aerospace and medicine, among others.
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By GlobalDataThe American Technion Society (ATS) supports the Technion. Based in New York City, it is the leading American organization supporting higher education in Israel, with more than 20,000 supporters and 17 offices around the country.
