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COLUMBIA — Maury County E-911 dispatchers watched in fascination as their global positioning satellite system tracked a series of false calls Thursday afternoon — to a 14-year-old student on a school bus.

''When we saw a pattern to the calls, we started watching where they were being made from,'' said E-911 Director Freddie Rich. ''We could see the route the vehicle was taking, and we heard kids laughing in the background, so I called the school transportation department and asked if they had a bus near Theta Pike and Highway 43.

''They said it was bus 26, and we got him,'' Rich said.

The 14-year-old Central High School student, whose name is not being released because of his age, was charged with being delinquent, suspected of making false emergency calls, Rich said.

''First, he said there was a robbery on East Eighth Street, then he called another robbery in on Evergreen, then McDonald's,'' Rich said. ''Finally, he called again, saying his daddy was beating up on his mother.''

Police were dispatched to each of the calls, even after dispatchers saw a pattern. ''You can't just pass them up, even if you think they're false,'' Rich said. ''You've got to dispatch an officer to check it out.''

In all, seven calls were made to the emergency dispatch center between 2:51 and 3:05 p.m., during the boy's ride home from school.

Global positioning technology is built into most newer cell phones.

''The thing that tipped us off was the kids laughing and cutting up in the background,'' Rich said, ''that, and our GPS technology, which followed his trail.''

How GPS works

Global positioning satellite navigation is a system funded and controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense.

While there are many thousands of civil users of GPS worldwide, the system was designed for and is operated by the U.S. military.

The space segment of the system consists of 24 satellites that orbit the Earth in 12 hours. They send radio signals from space.

A GPS receiver locates four or more of the satellites, determines the distance to each of them and uses the information to deduce its own location.