HOT ROD Power Tour 2017 Is Presented By Chevrolet Performance and Driven By Continental Tire
You never know who you are going to meet or what stories you will find on the Power Tour, so we try to stop and talk to as many people as we can. While we were hiding in the shade at the Iowa Speedway, we starting talking to Ross Ortman who turned out to be the owner of Dakota Digital. We were pleased to note that he is one of us, a car guy, who happened to turn a garage-based hobby into a dream gig making digital gauges for street rods.
In the 1980s, the chances of your speedo just lying on the peg were pretty high since the factories had moved away from cables and started using the vehicle speed sensor, or VSS to send speed signals from the transmission. At that time Ortman had a BA degree in Electronics Engineering Technology and was working by day as a design engineer. As a side business, Ortman began creating kits that allowed hobbyists to build their own TSS driven speedometers or custom tachometers for their street machines.
By the early 1990s, he had 6 or 7 people working for him so he quit his job to build gauges full time. Now Dakota Digital gauges are all over street rods and moving into classic trucks. Applications are nice, but the really cool thing is how display technology has changed in the last 20 years. What started as an LED screen with a little bit of information has turned into high-res screens with full-sweep electronic pointers. Ortman told us the next big thing will be virtual screens that don’t use mechanical parts at all. Or is it already here?
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