In order to measure reduced emissions from diesel trucks and off-road vehicles, the Sacramento Air Quality Management District (SMAQMD) in California signed a five-year contract with Satellite Security Systems (S3) to install its GlobalGuard satellite tracking technology in up to 6,000 vehicles.

As part of the SMAQMD program to reduce ozone forming pollutant emissions, GlobalGuard units will be installed on every participating vehicle, with SMAQMD offering financial incentives for diesel vehicle owners to participate.

“We use satellite for communications from the asset themselves,” John Phillips, president of Satellite Security Systems, told Satellite News. “We are monitoring their location or their activity onboard through sensors, whether it’s a pump or a generator that they have retrofitted for cleaner burning emissions. We put our transponder on the asset. It talks to the satellite and then we are able to log exactly where they’ve been.”

S3 uses the Motorola [MOT] ReFLEX satellite communications system as the backbone for GlobalGuard. ReFLEX is a secure, two-way messaging infrastructure that S3 says provides a wide range of crucial technical and economic advantages.

S3 is tracking vehicle usage for SMAQMD in Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, Placer, El Dorado and portions of Sutter. S3 is tracking the number of hours engines are in use and the miles a vehicle traveles in the various regions and provides that data to SMAQMD on a monthly basis.

“Once SMAQMD obtains the data, They are taking that data and they will do their own computation based on what type of engine [is in] that vehicle,” Phillips explained. “They take the amount of time that was run and what the activities were for that device and compare the two to see what kind of reduction you would have had in emissions had they been running an older engine.”

Previously, SMAQMD relied on bi-annual hard copy surveys mailed from program participants to track engine usage and were labor intensive, S3 said.

–Gregory Twachtman

(John Phillips, Satellite Security Systems, 619/574-1452)