Trial results of a new low-cost and covert technology to trace the path of maritime containers worldwide

There are approximately 7 million maritime style containers within Canada, and 70 million within the USA. The interiors of such containers are rarely inspected. With market globalization, a large amount of these containers enter North America on a daily basis. Such containers may include contraband or dangerous items that present an economic or security risk. Despite significant security improvements, only 3 to 5% of the maritime containers, that arrive in or transition through North America, go through physical inspection. Current container tracking technologies based on GPS consume high DC power, are costly, require line-of-sight with satellites and they are often too large to be covert. It is possible to overcome some of these limitations by basing the tracking system on the FM broadcast signal which is an alternative man-made signal that is reasonably ubiquitous, provides a geographically unique frequency spectrum and is about 100,000 as strong as a GPS satellite signal. This allows the development of a low cost, low power and miniature FM receiver that can record frequency spectrums and compare them to known data in order to trace the path that the container has taken for less than 10$ per container. This paper presents the first results of highway trials (train and sea trials are to be conducted in 2009) of such a low cost, covert, non-GPS based technology (called "FM Tag") that records the worldwide displacement of containers and displays the path undertaken by the container while in transit. As an added security benefit, the tag is also capable of detecting container door openings. In addition to presenting the first trial results, this paper covers the innovative engineering aspects of using the metal enclosure of a maritime container as a VHF antenna, thereby eliminating the need to add an external antenna and achieving the goal of being 100% covert.