THE TAXI INDUSTRY
Let your vehicles tell YOU
where THEY are…
The Lynx and Datax data system is the first PMR/GPRS taxi and private hire solution to contain the boundaries of the various rank areas within the memory of the vehicle mounted data equipment. In the taxi office, staff define the boundaries of their ranks by drawing polygon shapes on the maps on their PC. Once those polygons have been drawn the points that define them are loaded into the mobile data equipment, the Datax and the Lynx.
The Datax MMI is housed in a rugged black anodised aluminium extruded enclosure with simple embossed tactile pushbuttons for safe operation by a driver. Vehicle installation uses the popular Herbert-Richter range of universal mounts for a choice of installation methods from windscreen suction mounts to heater vent clips.
The Lynx Communications Bridge mounts discretely away out of sight and a single 6-way RJ11 lead that can be easily terminated to length in the field connects the Lynx and the Datax together. GPS and GPRS are catered for by a combi antenna either dashboard mounted or magnetic / thru-hole type mounted on the roof for optimum performance. The Lynx features a ‘Dedicated Navigator Interface’ to automatically feed job details and GPS data to dedicated in-vehicle navigation units such as the Garmin Nuvi and TomTom Go.
As vehicles drive around, the Datax MMI receives GPS fixes from the GPS receiver in the Lynx Communications Bridge and keeps the driver informed of his current rank and status on a 128×64 pixel LCD display which is also used to display job information. As soon as the vehicle crosses a boundary into a new rank a status and location update data packet is sent to the office by the Lynx.
The nature of how vehicles drive around creates its own inherent randomizer to avoid data packet collisions and the frequency of actual boundary crossing events minimises the number of transmissions to those that are only necessary.
In the allocation of jobs, knowledge of what rank a vehicle is in is more important than the exact GPS location of that vehicle.