Digital tachograph solution for builders

Downloader Solo digital tachograph kit, available from Smartcard Focus, is designed to enable operators of single trucks or small fleets to meet legal requirements.

Many building contractors have been, or shortly will be, affected by recent legislation requiring all new trucks over 3.5 tonnes to be fitted with a digital tachograph.

The regulations are intended to ensure compliance with safety regulations, especially those relating to limits on driving hours, but they equally affect building contractors who may only use their trucks for an hour or two each day, as well as the transport operators at whom the regulations are primarily aimed.

With the old analogue tachographs, building contractors operating just one or two trucks could just check and store the tachograph waxed paper discs, confident that there was little chance of breaking regulations.

However, with the new digital tachographs, operators are required to regularly download data from the new driver's cards (every three weeks) and from the tachograph vehicle unit (every three months) and store it, in digital form, for inspection by the authorities, if requested.

To tackle this issue, there are many subscription-based online analysis services available, but these are aimed at multi-vehicle transport fleet operators and are an unnecessarily expensive and complicated solution for most building contractors and owner-operators.

The Downloader Solo digital tachograph kit, available from Smartcard Focus, is designed for operators of single trucks or small fleets who just want to download, view, store and print data from drivers cards and the vehicle unit (VU) in order to meet legal requirements.

The inexpensive kit consists of a driver's smartcard reader and easy to use Downloader Solo software and provides everything needed to download and view data on a Windows PC.

There are no ongoing subscription charges.

The software instals and runs automatically and is incredibly easy to use.

When a drivers card is inserted into the reader, the data is automatically downloaded and the driver data can be viewed as daily data or as weekly summaries, and printed if required.

All the data from the card is stored with a logical filename so that it can be retrieved, archived or emailed later.

Smartcard Focus also supplies an easy-to-use download tool for the vehicle unit data, which can then be transferred to a PC or stored on a memory card.

Further details are available from the Tachograph Shop at: www.smartcardfocus.com Smartcard Focus are Europe's leading distributor of smartcard products and solutions.

Back to top