totaly new to me digi cards how often do you have to download it .also if driving for firm with one hired lorry where would you download and can you take card out do to this in middle of a shift .is card left in at night if away from base so many questions after 35 years driving trucks cheers…
As a driver your responsibility is to make the card available for download to the vehicle’s operator at least once every 28 days. The vehicles operator is responsible, so if it’s a hire lorry then it’s not the hire company but the operator that has hired the lorry who needs to download the card.
If you make it available and they for whatever reason don’t download it then that is their problem, not yours.
You can remove it during a shift for download if you wish, when you reinsert it you will be able to make a manual entry to cover the period the card was out of the tacho.
When away from base at night you can have the card in or out, your choice. If you leave it in then you need to manually enter your end location and ensure it is set to break for the duration of your daily rest period and then enter your start location in the morning when you start your shift.
Paul
There are a bunch of other threads on downloading digi cards, as I have recently responded to a few.
I have only recently had the facilities to download my digi card. Previously I just didn’t. I found other ways to keep track of my data, including a work diary of where and what I drove plus using an application on my mobile to keep track of my duty time. There are a variety of options these days for such things, depending on your level of record keeping.
As for leaving my tacho card in, even if I was permanently allocated to a vehicle I would eject the card at the end of my duty. Last year I found that even after the truck was parked up for the night it would still get moved by others in the yard when it was in the way. It wouldn’t take too much by someone with access to the lorry to change your setting on the tacho from break to other work and leave it like that overnight!
If you don’t want to complicate things and just to be able to read the data from the card without fully backing it up etc then you can get a key fob to enable you to read the card in that way. Links all in the other threads on this subject 
Saratoga:
There are a bunch of other threads on downloading digi cards, as I have recently responded to a few.I have only recently had the facilities to download my digi card. Previously I just didn’t.
I feel I should perhaps post something here to ensure the OP doesn’t get mixed up between his personal responsibilities and the operator’s responsibilities.
You personally as a driver have no legal obligation to download anything from your card for your own personal records. If you wish to do so then you can do and you can get the kit to do it relatively cheaply but I would be surprised if many drivers at all bother with this.
However, you must ensure your card is available for the vehicle’s operator to download at least once every 28 days. It is a legal requirement for the operator to download your card at least every 28 days, although some will do it every week, or even at the end of every shift (especially in the case of agency drivers).
Contrary to popular belief downloading the data from a card does not delete anything from the card, you can download the same data repeatedly if you wish to. The data is only lost when the card fills up and new data starts to overwrite the oldest data on there. Depending on your work pattern this could take a year or more.
Paul
My old digi card held stuff back to 2007, but then I have mostly driven older vehicles and have used almost an equal amount of paper tachographs vs the digi card.
I do agree to what Repton has said. Theoretically if you had the equipment available for your own use and your own records as a driver you could download the data from the card yourself and email the .ddd file to the company, and the cheapest option out there to do that had been £20’s of software and the card reader.
Otherwise you could just not bother and know that you drive to the law but don’t want to keep the details.
The only difference that I have seen with the variety of digi software is finding any software that will tell you your speed at a time/date from the digi card. Is there any software out there that will do that? It keeps milage but not speed…
cliffystephens:
totaly new to me digi cards how often do you have to download it .also if driving for firm with one hired lorry where would you download and can you take card out do to this in middle of a shift .is card left in at night if away from base so many questions after 35 years driving trucks cheers…
As repton has said it’s the operators responsibility to download the data from the driver card at-least every 28 days, your responsibility ends at making the card available for download.
Unless you’re an O/D you don’t need to buy software to download your own card it’s solely the operators responsibility, the operator also has to download the data from the tachograph itself at-least every 56 days.
Taking the card out in the middle of a shift seems a bit of a waste of time as you will need to do a manual entry to account for the time the card was out of the tachograph, most companies download the card either at the end of a shift or at the start of a shift before the card has been inserted into the tachograph.
Whether you leave the card in or take it out really depends on your personal choice and whether or not the vehicle will be moved by anyone else, as has been said if you leave the card in you should finish the shift by manually entering the end location and then manually enter the start location when you start a new shift.
To be honest as you’re new to digital tachograph I would recommend taking the card out, but it is your choice.
Good luck
cheers guys you been great help …