Whether at sea, on rail, stacked or stored, shipping containers can now be tracked worldwide via satellite with Cont-Trak, developed through ESA’s telecommunications programme. Field trials have been carried out at a container depot in Halifax, Canada to test different stacking situations, and during shipping from Europe to North America. Containers were fitted with Cont-Trak terminals, set to provide reports every four hours, and sent on their normal routes.
These tests achieved seamless coverage between the North American and European systems. Transmissions were made from ships, in harbour, on lorries and on rail, and all the time the system was able to receive and process polling commands.
“Cont-Trak can track containers in remote locations where no terrestrial communication networks are available,” explains ESA’s Norbert Hübner, “such as the transit of containers via rail, road, ships in the middle of the ocean, or storage of containers in remote locations all over the world.
“The major challenge was to solve the problem of container stacking, which typically represents a major obstacle for the requirement of line-of-sight communication with satellites. This challenge was met.”
