Oil Field Drivers & Workers Needed Badly!

I haven't ruled anything out yet, but I haven't bought one so far because my laptop computer does everything online that I want it to do, because I live in an area with 1 bar max of cell phone reception, and because I avoid as many services that bill me monthly as I can. I talk so little on a phone that I save money by going pre-paid at 10 cents per minute, which unfortunately has a $10 per month minimum.
My last OTR trucking job had Qualcomm on all trucks. I can certainly understand why local companies might not want to have Qualcomm, but plain gps devices are available and would probably pay for themselves very quickly in fuel savings alone.
I have years of experience on using paper maps and atlases, but I have read in another thread that the maps Eagleone use are very often faulty. Is this true across the oilfield industry?

 

This isn't OTR... This is off road.

You can spend the $ on a smart phone or stand alone GPS or you can lose money spending all your shift looking for leases and not getting paid.

 

at the rate the lease roads are being built around here, its more pen and paper and reliability on who's been there the longest. gps will give you the entrance of the lease road from black top at best.
If you get lost it will be because you took a wrong turn after the 3rd mesquite behind the 2nd cactus of the 4th cattle guard.. no gps will come to your rescue. (even less if you work nights)

90% of the oilfield work is not how the truck works or the drive its to know where the stuff is at and how to get there. (that swd is closed, ok where is the closest one, where to get brine, or fresh , etc)

 

I do pretty much the same as TleaHeart. Some of the fields I go to are not new, but they are new to me. Cell phone service in my area is just about worthless, but there is good signal for my GPS. I have a Garmin Nuvi which I let track my movements and then save the well locations to favorites. Sometimes dispatch will have field maps-I make copies whenever I can. Pumpers can be pretty helpful too. In many fields there is a system for numbering well-not the API number-but something like "Coyote 24-12" one of the numbers is probably the section number in which it is located, the other may describe the type of well-odd numbers are producers-even numbers are injectors ( or something like that). There is no substitute for a good map that shows the well location, but in new areas they don't seem to exist. Sometimes clues like these can help you figure it out. There is software for GPS available for this purpose(Oiltrax comes to mind), but they are generally slow to update and they may only give the bottom hole location which makes the information just about useless with the long offsets we are seeing.

 

Can we all just agree that there is no such thing as a "good" signal in a GPS. It's a GPS. It's going to work worldwide, it's not a cellphone. That's why it's called a Global Positioning System.

 

I just use my Verizon phone with satellite map turned on once I get to the lease road. Unless it's brand new the satellite map shows the lease roads. I drop a pin once I'm there and star it....that way I have it saved in my phone for next time.

FWIW, I seem to have service when no one else does...and yes, I work at nights.

 

Thanks, good stuff

 

I called the mud engineer at a rig site to ask about it road , cr29, I asked him the name of the road because it was not numbered. He didn't know so I asked him about how far down the road the rig was he said about a mile from the end. It ended up being 24 miles . my phone map showed 2 cr 29's. Good thing I didn't get on 95 or I could have ended up in key west.

 

I love texas