What Puget Sound-based company has won kudos from InformationWeek magazine as the best technology innovator in the country?

If you’re thinking Microsoft, Amazon, RealNetworks, Expedia, Nintendo or any of dozens of technology companies based here, you’re off the mark.

InformationWeek has named Bellevue heavy truck maker Paccar as the nation’s highest achiever in technology. Paccar makes heavy duty Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF trucks.

InformationWeek honored Paccar for its creation of a real -time communications and monitoring system for its big trucks that constantly provides their location and vital statistics to remote control centers.

The system, developed with the help of two Puget Sound-based tech companies, Microsoft and SignalSet, can provide information remotely about a truck’s speed, fuel economy, location, mechanical health and vital signs to a company dispatch center.

Paccar developed the system, now available in its big rigs as TruckerLink, during the heart of the recession when truck sales fell steeply.

One of the unique features of the system is its ability to automatically switch its communications link from one carrier to another based on signal strength, price and other considerations. Other truck monitoring system by other manufacturers use a single carrier resulting in broken connections where that carrier’s cell signal is weak.