Antenna innovator Ethertronics, Inc. is supplying antennas to DriveCam, Inc., a firm involved in Drive Risk Management. DriveCam's risk-mitigation solution is used by distribution fleets worldwide to predict and prevent risky driving behavior. It is also being used by parents' to monitor their childrens' driving behaviors.
A DriveCam video event recorder is mounted on the vehicle's windshield behind the rearview mirror. It captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle, including exceptional forces such as hard braking and swerving. The antenna is used to transmit captured digital video information from these events to a center for analysis. The DriveCam systems incorporate both a cellular main and diversity antenna from Ethertronics. The main quad-band antenna covers the GSM 850, GSM 900, DCS, and PCS bands while the diversity antenna operates on GPS and CDMA bands.
As Peter Ellegaard, Vice-President of hardware and firmware engineering at DriveCam points out, "With DriveCam's user base, it is critical that our Driver Risk Management solutions work along thousands of roads and highways without coverage holes, which is why we charged Ethertronics with providing a universal antenna solution that could also provide GPS capabilities while operating across a variety of cellular frequency bands." He added, "In addition, by incorporating Ethertronics' embedded antennas into our product, we were able to improve the overall device performance and design a unit that is robust, secure and most importantly, unobtrusive to the driver."
DriveCam, Inc. (www.drivecam.com) Ethertronics, Inc. (www.ethertronics.com)