Digitalize Radio Tracking Suggestions

Joey SM

New Member
Hello CB,

I am working a festival down here in DC and one of my jobs is to handle radio tracking and they are Motorola XPR 3500e series walkies. Now my boss wants me to digitalize tracking them. So here is what I came up with so far. Each radio has a S/N on the back of each and we do have a bar code scanner which does scan the S/N nicely into a excel spreadsheet. So I printed out a sign out sheet for the radios just to get some basic information from the person signing out the radio (Name, contact #, time/date..etc.) I would then take that information and type it information into the excel spreadsheet. The S/N will just be scanned into the spreadsheet. We will have about 50 or so radios out and about during the festival.

Short version of steps to sign out (example)
1. Susan fills out sign out info (Name,date, time, contact #)
2. I give them Radio # F3717
3. I upload info in the spreadsheet
4. We can now track that Susan has radio F3717 and how to contact her if we need back.

Just looking for Suggestion/discussion points to see if this is as good as I think it is or if someone else has done something like this and can give me a few pointers.

Thanks,

J
 
Seems legit.

Outside of putting GPS on them it looks like a good plan.
 
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Erm, Tile uses bluetooth, so the radios are likely to be out of bluetooth range most of the time, I think you'd just be wasting money...

Having someone fill in a form that you then type in seems inefficient, you might as well just use paper at that point, or else type straight in to your document.
Depending on how the function is being organised, company could be an important piece of information to collect as well.

Riedel and the likes do this on a much larger scale, and no doubt have some form of database system, but the excel sheet could be easy enough. It might work better to just create a list of all the radios to start with, give you an overview of stock on hand and the like...
 
Put a big number on each of the radios and take a picture of the person holding the item (or their ID card next to the radio). The photo's digital info has the date/time.

It also works great for lending tools, scripts, etc.
 
Google forms... and have it fill out to a Google sheets file which is a simple .xls file everyone can fill out their own info on their phone or you can provide a few simple tablets ... fire tablets are less than 100 bucks now ... it's easy to set up you will get all the info the same way as now without any data entry on your part onsite ... let the radio taker do the work.
 

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