5 tips for crisis prevention when working remotely

Author: Ian Sheldon

When working abroad or in remote parts of the world, be it through serving for the armed forces or being part of an aid group, it’s unfortunate that a crisis situation might be not far away. In this situations its absolutely essential that procedures are put in place to help prevent crisis, or give the personnel involved a change to evade crisis should it occur.

Here are 5 simple tips to help remote workers in the event of a crisis:

1. Ensure that your team have up to date maps. When working in a country that is foreign to your personnel l an up to date map can help them find their way should they venture from their main routes and get lost.

2. Food and Water supply. Make sure that your team have stocked up on food and water. Dont just look at packing the bare essentials, but consider a scenario where you might be forced to stay away overnight or for a few days.

3. First Aid. Always have a first aid kit at the ready. You never know when it might be needed, even for the smallest accident. A first aid kit will help buy you some time should an unfortunate event occur within your team.

4. Clothing and footwear. When you are in a foreign country you never know when the weather might turn. It could be extremely hot one minute with a downpour of rain (and floods) the next. Be prepared for a sudden change in the weather

5. Communications. Give your team the ability to communicate with a central base within the distance of their travel. GPS Tracking can prove to be a life saving technology be it through simple tracking of personnel or communications over a radio network.

All of the above 5 points should be part of any remote teams planning and preparation when sending personnel out into the field. The welfare and safety of your team should be the absolute paramount of importance and nothing should be taken for granted. Up front planning and a well thought of crisis management plan will not only help save lives, but also give your team the confidence to go out and concentrate on their task at hand.

About the Author:

Track 24 provide global tracking and crisis management technology for remote workers in the field. Their unique communications platform enables tracking over land, sea and air ensuring the safety of troops and aid workers. Track 24 technologies have been used in conflict situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and will continue to prevent and manage crisis situations for years to come.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - 5 tips for crisis prevention when working remotely

The Sat Nav – How it Works

Author: Richard n Williams
The ‘sat-nav’ has revolutionised the way we travel. From taxi drivers, couriers and the family car to airliners and tanks, satellite navigation devices are now fitted in almost every vehicle as it comes off the production line. While GPS systems certainly have their flaws, they have several uses too.

Navigation is just one of the main uses of GPS but it is also employed as a source of time for GPS NTP time servers.

Being able to pin point locations from space has saved countless lives as well as making travelling to unfamiliar destinations trouble free. Satellite navigation relies on a constellation of satellites known as GNSS (Global Navigational Satellite Systems). Currently there is only one fully functioning GNSS in the world which is the Global Positioning System (GPS).

GPS is owned and run by the US military. The satellites broadcast two signals, one for the American military and one for civilian use. Originally, GPS was meant solely for the US armed forces but following an accidental shooting down of an airliner, the then President of the US Ronald Reagan opened the GPS system to the world’s population to prevent future tragedies.

GPS has a constellation of over 30 satellites. At any one time at least four of these satellites are overhead, which is the minimum number required for accurate navigation.

The GPS satellites each have onboard an atomic clock. Atomic clocks use the resonance of an atom (the vibration or frequency at particular energy states) which makes them highly accurate, not losing as much as a second in time over a million years. This incredible precision is what makes satellite navigation possible.

The satellites broadcast a signal from the onboard clock. This signal consists of the time and the position of the satellite. This signal is beamed back to earth where your car’s sat nav retrieves it. By working out how long this signal took to reach the car and triangulating four of these signals the computer in your GPS system will work out exactly where you are on the face of the world. (Four signals are used because of elevation changes – on a ‘flat’ earth only three would be required).

GPS systems can only work because of the highly precise accuracy of the atomic clocks. Because the signals are broadcast at the speed of light and accuracy of even a millisecond (a thousandth of a second) could alter the positioning calculations by 100 kilometres as light can travel nearly 100,00km each and every second –currently GPS systems are accurate to about five metres.

The atomic clocks onboard GPS systems are not just used for navigation either. Because atomic clocks are so accurate GPS makes a good source of time. NTP time servers use GPS signals to synchronize computers networks to. A NTP GPS server will receive the time signal from the GPS satellite then convert it to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) and distribute it to all devices on a network providing highly accurate time synchronization.
About the Author:
Richard N Williams is a technical author and specialist in atomic clocks, telecommunications, NTP and network time synchronisation helping to develop dedicated NTP clocks. Please visit us for more information about a Galleon ntp server or other time server solutions.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - The Sat Nav – How it Works