Changes to QC logging parameters

Funny thing is there's nothing on the FMCSA or OMNITRACS website about the change.

ELDFACTS.COM says current users of elogs have until late 2019 to comply with the new Mandate that has not been published.

I'd bet these companies asked for this change to better cover there butts.

 

But you know SNI has to go 4 steps beyond DOT

 

I know and on the Omnitracs site there's a quote from SNI.

I'll never believe they did ask for and push for this.

 

I agree, Tenn! I've been keeping close track of anything involving the logs, & I was really surprised to see this as I didn't see language about it anywhere else recently

 

From what I have read and heard from drivers at other companies with the same unit what the change does is instead of you meeting the threshold and it changes duty status at that point, for example you start driving at 1030 and the threshold is met at 1035 the old way would show the duty status change at 1035 not 1030. Now the new update will change the duty status once you meet the threshold but back the time up to 1030 when you actually started moving instead of 1035 when the the threshold was met.

Now, someone asked about device loosing power to keep it from tracking. If say hypothetically the device was to go through a reboot process just before you started driving and were still on offduty status the device would have no clue when you started driving and so the time to the threshold wouldn't start counting until the unit fully rebooted back up. Now if you were to hypothetically stop at a stop light and switch yourslef back to offduty if it did switch over to drive before the 4 minute threshold it shouldn't register as any drive time but show as offduty. Also, if you hypothetically restrated the mcp a second time right after it rebooted it might hang up and give you almost 10 minutes of a frozen state where it still can't log anything for you. You could hypthetically drive the 10 miles from the TA in El Paso to the Costco without ever showing the drive line at all if you reboot the unit a second time. Just saying hypothetically is all.

 

I'm with JCT with the QC and Omintracs. We have not gotten any messages that state that kind of change. The logging still works the same way for us as it always has.

 

Of course then there will be a discrepancy between the mileage stored in the trucks ECM and the mileage the MCP expects when it reboots which probably gets on the batphone to SNI and red flags you. I'd assume that's how they caught all those ICs who were unplugging the MCP and then driving around.

 

They way it was explained to me by a log department at another company, it only shows up on a report if it's a 10 mile or more gps location jump because we all know how reliable the qc is with gps sometimes. Not sure how many times it's told me I am driving in a lake or river and need to turn around when possible, lol. I mean if your theroy is correct think about all the times the QC looses its com link with sni. It would be no different here, it's lost it's com link with sni and is just reporting the newest odm number that it pulls directly from the ECM.

I am no expert on the qc but with how it's wired and what it looks at, when it reboots all it's going to do is see what the current value is and doesn't know what the last one was. For location and mileage purposes on the qc, it's all gps based from how it's been explained to me by a qc IT person at a different place that used the same mcp we do here at sni. It'll be interesting to see how and what the changes do to the qc when it happens. Now if someone could get a copy of an older software version to reinstall onto the qc once the updates are done being pushed, then one could run with the old rules. The old company I worked at would have usb drives they would put into the qc to update them if they weren't getting the updates over the air. It's amazing how many of the techs would leave the thumbdrive in the truck

 

Even when the QC goes down it records

 

Hell, QC goes down while I'm driving and it doesn't get itself restarted until 15 minutes after I've been parked, it logs it ALL as drive time. ...of course, my QC crashes every evening at 7pm for NO REASON, so I try to make sure I'm going to keep on driving or I'm going to still be stopped having dinner at my allotted crash time.