Fastrax Ltd was established in 1999 in Helsinki by a group of people with a background from the company Vaisala.   Fastrax has become known for manufacturing some of the smallest and power efficient GPS solutions in the market. The products have a very high sensitivity making positioning possible even in relatively GPS hostile environments.
	The software from Fastrax is open allowing modifications and tuning of the GPS stack, and the powerful DSP core allows also implementation of rather advanced own applications internally in the modules.
The Fastrax philosophy is to deliver solutions with an optimal combination of the 5P's for GPS:   Power Battery size (weight) and life are often very important parameters in portable GPS based systems. Lowest possible power consumption and fastest possible time to first fix is very important for these applications.   Packing Manufacturability and physical size are also very important, and the trend moves toward more and more compact designs.   Performance In many applications you just need to update position or exact time regularly (no continous navigation), and you only need a fast fix to get this update before you turn off the receiver. Fast acquisition of data will therefore have larger influence on battery life than the actual power consumption. The sensitive receiver front end and proprietary algorithms for fast TTFF make this achievable at the same time as navigation in GPS hostile environments, like indoor, urban jungle, forests or narrow valley, are improved. The latest generation receiver also implements Kalman navigation algorithms, and inputs for gyro, compas and AGPS/DGPS are further improving this.   Programmability Programmability is allowing modifications and tuning of GPS stack as well as implementing own application in the free processor capacity on the module (appr. 16 MIPS / up to 8 Mb flash). In this way many external components - including an extra microcontroller/processor - can be removed saving substantial cost.

 

  http://www.fastrax.fi