Project Signcutter is a joint research effort among the Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff's Department (PCSD), the Arizona Alliance Planning Committee (AAPC), the Electronic Proving Ground, and the Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center. Pima County is geographically large, shares 120 miles of border with Mexico, and lies within a designated high-intensity drug trafficking area. It contains not only the metropolitan Tucson area, housing nearly 1 million people, but also hundreds of square miles of remote and mostly uninhabited mountainous desert, most of which lies within Indian reservations. These factors all contribute to the increasingly sophisticated narcotics smuggling and distribution enterprises that operate within the jurisdictions of the PCSD and AAPC. Vehicle location will be determined by differential Global Positioning System techniques, possibly supplemented by inertial navigation. The position data will then be transmitted back to the Signcutter Base Station via a standard land mobile radio system for those vehicles within the Tucson area. Commercial satellite communications services, such as those provided by the new low earth orbit satellites, will be used to communicate the position data back from vehicles that are outside the Tucson area or expected to be leaving the area.