Trimble's Placer Gold GPS Receivers Available for Public Safety Applications

November 2, 2009

Trimble announced today the availability of its Placer Gold receiver, a 12-channel Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver , designed to provide reliable, fully-configurable vehicle location and reporting for mission-critical automatic vehicle location (AVL) applications. Trimble's Placer receivers are used by public safety and emergency responders to more efficiently locate and dispatch response vehicles.

The Placer Gold products replace the Placer 450. The product line now includes two models: the Placer Gold (APU) and Placer Gold Dead Reckoning Unit (DRU). In addition to 12 channels, the Placer Gold features indicator lights (a new feature not previously available on the Placer 450), a small form factor, and compatibility with point-to-point protocol (PPP) data radios. The Placer Gold DRU’s on-board dead reckoning sensor outputs position data in the absence of satellite signal reception using a built-in angular rate sensor, a vehicle speed input, and a reverse signal input. This solution allows dispatchers to track vehicles through obstructed areas, such as tunnels, urban canyons, and mountains.

“The Placer Gold offers a highly reliable GPS receiver to the public safety and utilities market for use in their AVL systems,” said Rick Beyer, vice president of Trimble’s Mobile Solutions segment. “The new product is a continuation of Trimble’s decade-long tradition of offering high performance and robust GPS solutions to the public safety community.”

According to the company, the Placer Gold offers:

Reliability: The Placer product line has had a mean time between failures (MTBF) of more than 100,000 hours. This reliability results in a need for fewer spares to support a large fleet and one spare unit can typically serve as a back up for a fleet of up to 1,000 vehicles, Trimble said.
Robustness: Throughout its history of actual field usage, the comany said, the Placer product line has proven to be robust, generally unaffected by in-vehicle radio frequency interference (RFI) or a "sagging" power source.
Full configuration: With two separate serial/USB ports, multiple output protocols (NMEA and TAIP) and a digital I/O port, the Placer Gold may be configured to work with major public safety Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems, in-vehicle mapping and/or CAD application software. The Placer Gold receiver can connect directly to a laptop, a mobile data radio modem, or both a laptop and modem, with each independent serial port configured to output the same or different protocols and baud rates.
Time and distance reporting: It allows triggering of position reports when time and/or distance criteria are met; this feature allows emergency responders to automatically increase the reporting frequency based on vehicle speed, which results in reduced network bottlenecks and wireless transmission costs.

Placer Gold APU and Placer Gold DRU are available now from Trimble’s Mobile Resource Management (MRM) sales team. For more information, call 1-877-883-4367 or e-mail. The Trimble Placer product line is used by more than 500 police, sheriff, and fire departments nationwide, Trimble said.

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