Vehicle Tracking: A Beginners Guide

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teddykiller said:
yer looks the same, id pay extra from Amazon as if things go wrong you have nothing to worry about, unlike the ebay muppets.
Like Ryder says any tracker is better than no tracker, and this one i bought does the job i want it to do very nicely.
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does it show the vehicle location as grid co-ordinates or on a map? How easy is it to pull up on a pooter (I don't do modern mobile phones).
 
basically you call the tracker and it texts you back with coordinates, you can just click the link on your phone and it opens google maps. on the pc you just enter the coordinates to show you where the motor is.
 
I've come from 9 months ownership of a new Range Rover Sport to find that my cheap and cheerful defender seems far more nickable. Never even considered that when swapping over. Ive then gone on to invest significant time and materials into it and I think a tracker is going to be a must. There was one featured in Land Rover International this month that as well as tracking kept stats on your driving and had all the usual remote kill and text updates. Carrotech or something I think. £299 to buy and about £35 a year for the SIM. Anyone used that one?
 
Mine's cheaper.... displays on a map via a website or else I am workingon a downloadable application that will run on a PC and display the position too - each option has its advantages... the application is definitely faster... and I hope it will be more flexible. Replaying driven routes and so on should be easier to accomplish.

Sending kill commands to the vehicle or monitoring stuff should be simple from either the web page or the application but it will be a simple choice for the user at the end of the day...

James, I think that the division between phone and computer is starting to become blurred. I know what you mean about the phone screen, I hate using the internet on the phone, but sometimes I imagine that it is more convenient to send a text message to the vehicle to tell it that you want the engine isolated or that you want the position monitored than it would be to use a PC... when you are at a car park or leaving it for some time away from home perhaps.
 
Hi All,

These are just £28 here in China.
I brought a few of them home last time I returned to UK.
My brother has put 1 in his car, 1 in the caravan, 1 in his pan European, and 1 in his wifes car.
He has said that some times, he gets a false message to say the car has moved more than 100 meters.
So he has now set the geofence to 250 meters.
They all come with a 12 volt to 4,7volt converter.
They all just have an Asda sim in them with £5.00, and the Asda sim is loaded as a data sim, not a voice phone sim.
For £28 each, he is more than happy.
The trackers work in 2 modes, well actually 3 modes.
You can set it for voice, so it can listen in, on conversations, or you can set it to "live" and also set it to some thing else, I can't remember.


vette
 
Remember that while a sim is set to listen it can not usually be used for gprs activity. Thus you are losing some of the functionality by listening to talk in the cab.

The cheap trackers may seem to do their job and I will not deride them any further than I have done already... but I would suggest that you look carefully at their specifications. decent system will report the position to within a meter these days.

If you are checking the tracker daily then reliability is not so much of an issue since when it does go tits up you can just buy another one. If you want to install and forget then buy one with good specifications.

however... horses for courses and all that!
 
re jammers...available on the net..yes they do jam the gps signal...

and besides can be made very easily too..its not like the gps signal frequencies are top secret is it...
 
i am not putting up links to them!!!if really interested just google gps frequencies...one can make a transmitter on any frequency for a tenna...50 gets you programable go anywhere 1w device...it ain't difficult..(if you have the knowledge..ie pll sweeping across certain range in 1ghz (ish) area at speed.. )

but i not post any link to how to do on here...not that i have even made one,but as the specs are out there it is easy..
 
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zen said:
i am not putting up links to them!!!if really interested just google gps frequencies...one can make a transmitter on any frequency for a tenna...50 gets you programable go anywhere 1w device...it ain't difficult..(if you have the knowledge..ie pll sweeping across certain range in 1ghz (ish) area at speed.. )

but i not post any link to how to do on here...not that i have even made one,but as the specs are out there it is easy..
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It's easy if you have the know how... but that applies to most things. As I have said before... nothing will stop your vehicle from being stolen if a scroat really wants is badly enough. All you can do is slow them down and inconvenience them. You can take things to the nth degree if you want to.

For example... while it is easy to build such a transmitter... it is equally easy to build a receiver that will detect the jammer and take action accordingly. You can pursue this logic as far as you like, the question as to how far you go down this route is a personal one and will vary from person to person
 
Tazz I have sent an updated sheet with details of pebbletrack. Some of the assumptions on the sheet are inaccurate and I am hoping that Chunky will sort that out sometime soon (though I know he is busy atm)

What it shows, without question, is that my system is far and away the better one of the bunch ( buth then I would say that right?)
 
Hi Ryder,

Can you do me a favour and resend your updated sheet as I can't find your mail. (Probably been a numpty and deleted it in error or it's gone into spam by mistake etc).

Will PM you my email addy again.

Cheers
 
Its a no brainer, GPS will increase the chances of finding your vehicle and although its not 100% guaranteed, it could be the huge difference between finding your vehicle and not finding your vehicle.

Re blocking, GPS, DGPS, GSM, GPRS and 3G are all public frequencies...blocking a signal isnt hard with the right kit. You can build that stuff from a schematic with cost of ~£5 per band...but most wont and Trackers are proven to save some vehicles
 
td5diagnostics said:
Its a no brainer, GPS will increase the chances of finding your vehicle and although its not 100% guaranteed, it could be the huge difference between finding your vehicle and not finding your vehicle.

Re blocking, GPS, DGPS, GSM, GPRS and 3G are all public frequencies...blocking a signal isnt hard with the right kit. You can build that stuff from a schematic with cost of ~£5 per band...but most wont and Trackers are proven to save some vehicles
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You are right t a large extent and I, for one, appreciate your support of a technology that I have a vested interest in.

However... it is simple to make jamming non profitable....

Do not want to go into details, but making jamming a less likely theft tool is very straightforward.

GPS and GSM combined are definitely a powerful tool. I pridemyself in being a small operator and trying to take this technology further and forcing it to perform better and more varied duties than it has ever been asked to perform before.:D
 
Ryder said:
You are right t a large extent and I, for one, appreciate your support of a technology that I have a vested interest in.

However... it is simple to make jamming non profitable....

Do not want to go into details, but making jamming a less likely theft tool is very straightforward.

GPS and GSM combined are definitely a powerful tool. I pridemyself in being a small operator and trying to take this technology further and forcing it to perform better and more varied duties than it has ever been asked to perform before.:D
Click to expand...

Welcome, I think its definitely worthwhile and clearly a system like Pebbletrack will reduce hugely the chance of non-recovery.

As far as I am aware a good jammer will jam anything getting out or in. If someone is equipped with a GPS and GPRS jammer, then the system wont know where it is, even with a gsm dial option.

That said, there are immobiliser functions which can be called if a system detects use of a jammer.

Even Tracker with its VHF tracking isnt 100% secure.

Buy or make a faraday tent, drive the vehicle in, it will block any signal in or out. Then with a detector you can trace the activated vhf signal and remove it.

The above is pretty extreme and unlikely for a Landy I think. Most I would expect is someone to have bought a gps/gprs jammer from ebay.
 
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I guess it comes down to how much you want to spend....
rendering the vehicle immobile when a jamming system is detected is pretty straightforward... but it does start to take the overall price of the installation up.
 
Has anyone fitted a tracker/alarm combo to their Defender. If so can anyone recommend good kit? I quite like the look of the ones that buzz your keyfob if the alarm goes off and you are in range of the vehicle.
 
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