Lat-Lon, LLC

Lat-Lon provides Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and monitoring solutions to the transportation industry. Lat-Lon was founded in 1999 by Dave Baker and Steve Tautz. Lat-Lon is a privately held limited liability company and is partially owned by Tegra Corp of Sioux City, IA, founded in 1918.

Lat-Lon's RailRider units are deployed world wide on railcars,semi-trailers, shipping containers, locomotives, delivery vehicles, heavy equipment, and barges. Lat-Lon has several patents for its unique, self-contained, solar powered, GPS tracking and monitoring units. Lat-Lon collects data from intelligent wireless sensing devices and this information is communicated through cellular (GPRS), radio, or satellite modem to Lat-Lon for further processing. Customers can access data from anywhere through the Internet.

Shippers use the location and monitoring data to improve utilization, productivity, reduce maintenance, increase security, and improve customer support. Managers can quickly get answers to their logistics questions by running reports or viewing maps on the website. Data can also be passed directly to corporate fleet management computer systems for a complete integrated system with all lading information.

Geographic coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on the Earth to be specified by a set of numbers or letters, or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents vertical position, and two or three of the numbers represent horizontal position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation.

To specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection.

History

The invention of a geographic coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who composed his now-lost Geography at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. A century later, Hipparchus of Nicaea improved upon his system by determining latitude from stellar measurements rather than solar altitude and determining longitude by using simultaneous timing of lunar eclipses, rather than dead reckoning. In the 1st or 2nd century, Marinus of Tyre compiled an extensive gazetteer and mathematically-plotted world map, using coordinates measured east from a Prime Meridian at the Fortunate Isles of western Africa and measured north or south of the island of Rhodes off Asia Minor. Ptolemy credited him with the full adoption of longitude and latitude, rather than measuring latitude in terms of the length of the midsummer day. Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography used the same Prime Meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. After their work was translated into Arabic in the 9th century, Al-Khwārizmī's Book of the Description of the Earth corrected Marinus and Ptolemy's errors regarding the length of the Mediterranean Sea, causing medieval Arabic cartography to use a Prime Meridian around 10° east of Ptolemy's line. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes's recovery of Ptolemy's text a little before 1300; the text was translated into Latin at Florence by Jacobus Angelus around 1407.