Best vehicle tracker?

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Thats Bollocks

Thats Bollocks

Active Member
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Location
Barnsley
Hi guys
Anyone fitted a good vehicle tracker?
If so, how much?
I want one that i can monitor myself
Ie google maps or simular.
That way if the motor gets nicked!
At least i can beet the cops to the car and hulk smash the mother foockers
Lol
 
I have one. Is totally separate from the vehicle, therefore not affected by vehicle electrics. It doesn't control stuff tho - just used for tracking.
Ryders are designed to interface with the vehicle. He knows his stuff, but in the end I didnt opt for his.
 
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The Mad Hat Man said:
I have one. Is totally separate from the vehicle, therefore not affected by vehicle electrics. It doesn't control stuff tho - just used for tracking.
R
Click to expand...

So where does it get it's power from? The ones I have seen have their own small Gel battery but it is charged off the main car battery. My French insurance company wanted to fit one in my P38, who the hell is going to nick a RHD 12 year old P38?, They are pretty impossible to start without the key so it would be a low loader, not worth the effort when there are plenty of high value modern cars around. I just changed insurance company's when they wouldn't back down.
 
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They do great ones now, they turn the electrics off, or cant start them once you turn the ignition off
 
Hello... Missed this but thanks to Jai for the heads up..... That's Bollox.... let's have a natter about what you want from your system... there is a sticky about trackers somewhere about that I think you might want to read befroe buying.

Ignore the comments about being a drain on the battery... simply not true... a properly installed tracking system will consume about as much power as a clock... measure it in milliamps... and it can be reduced for periods where the vehicle is going to be left for a period of time. Rather than turn this into a spam post I am going to PM you my number and we can chat.
 
gencybay said:
Have a look at Open source anti-theft solution for your laptop, phone and tablet – Prey

I should think that a second hand smart phone on PAYG is rather cheaper than a proper tracking device and could be discreetly hidden in the dash somewhere.

Even if it doesn't suit your needs, try it on your laptop to see how scarily accurate it is.

G~
Click to expand...

I have been taking a look at this software and not only are the reviews pretty good... but as an anti theft tool for your laptop it is damn fine. I do not, personally, think that it would work efficiently as an anti theft or ATR tool for a vehicle.

Having said that... I always maintain that any security is better than no security. Also there are people on here who love their landys but simply have to work out their budget for their vehicle security... there are many different levels of security at just as many levels of cost... however I have yet to find a cheap option that measures up to the more professional options.

Of course I am always happy to be corrected.
 
Ryder, your beginners' guide states:"Anyone who seriouisly thinks that this is going to get them their vehicle back is kidding themselves.

The GPS system embedded in mobile phones is of a very low and hideously inaccurate variety. Positions are vague in the extreme.. in fact when I look at my own blackberry I am lucky to g1et a position closer than 200 yards of my current location."

Well on my humble cheap little Sony Android phone, google maps is accurate to a few metres, I use it regularly to find my way around towns and cities all over the country. I also use a Golf GPS app, and comparing results to my brother's £300 golf GPS, the distances reported are identical to the yard. Me thinks you are over-egging this a bit - perhaps to sell some kit?
 
PPS A bit off topic I know, if RS Components would get their arse in gear I'll get to build my own high-quality home-made tracker, a Raspberry Pi, with a Wifi, GPRS and GPS dongle running Prey. It'll cost more than a cheap Chinese unit but I can ensure I use high quality components. Not that I need a tracker driving a P38 - just wanted to build something useful with a Raspberry Pi! :) I'd expect the total cost to still be under £100 - especially as I already have a spare WiFi and GPRS dongle. I'll write some sort of heartbeat code so my phone can detect if the Tracker has gone down or is unreachable to determine how reliable it is or ftp a log back to a home server - I haven't decided yet.

As the Prey source code is available you could code any functionality you desire as well as use the computing power of the Raspberry Pi to run other useful software to, perhaps, datalog via OBDII or incorporate an "accident cam" using a dash-mounted webcam, accelerometers are dirt cheap and could be used to drive an incident capture routine - along with a panic button to do the same - you're only limited by imagination! Power consumption wise I reckon it'll average about 3 watts peaking at about 10 when booting or image capturing. I suspect building some sort of rechargeable battery into the setup (which only charges when the car is running or power is low) will be fairly trivial so there's no additional load on the sleeping car's battery.

You could also use it for in-car multimedia applications. Raspberry Pi has got to be one of the coolest bits of kit in a generation!
 
StuckAgainSteve said:
Ryder, your beginners' guide states:"Anyone who seriouisly thinks that this is going to get them their vehicle back is kidding themselves.

The GPS system embedded in mobile phones is of a very low and hideously inaccurate variety. Positions are vague in the extreme.. in fact when I look at my own blackberry I am lucky to g1et a position closer than 200 yards of my current location."

Well on my humble cheap little Sony Android phone, google maps is accurate to a few metres, I use it regularly to find my way around towns and cities all over the country. I also use a Golf GPS app, and comparing results to my brother's £300 golf GPS, the distances reported are identical to the yard. Me thinks you are over-egging this a bit - perhaps to sell some kit?
Click to expand...
No mate...

The GPS systems embedded in My blackberry does indeed provide positional info that is much lower, using a 12 channel receiver than the info received from a 64 channel receiver. Also positional information and the GPS receivers are compromised by buildlings abd iften built up areas... DGPS however, combats this.

Whenever someone posts about something in which they have a vested interest they open themselves to allegations of self interest... which is why I am completely transparent about my interest.

Apart from using receivers that are far superior, my own system does a great deal more and is a system that uses tracking as one of its measures only. consequently: you saying that you can replace a system like mine, or any other integrated system, is like me claiming I can replace an entire toolkit with a pair of pliers...

There are ways of producing cheap tracking systems... though if you did as you claimed and used proper components with a proper mobile phone... the costs of your system would be much greater than mine.

The crack about doing this to sell more kit was a bit of a cheap shot really - most people on here know what I do... if I were doing this for advertising it would be to people that don't know me already.
 
Besides... if a 64 channel DGPS high amplified receiver is truly no better than the naff receivers in mobile phones... then why would the manufacturers have moved from one to the other?

O have clients who are using the new kit... and they notice great improvements over the older receivers that we were using... and even they were better than the mobile phone ones.

would love to see how your system works out though - - - will be interesting to see how you handle the data compression and translating the data into a usable format for the database.
 
There are 64 satellites visible above the horizon these days? From memory in my yachting days there were rarely more than 12 sats available and 3 or 4 were sufficient to give an accurate fix if selective availability was off??
 
Ryder, I'm not knocking you or your business and you can be as disbelieving as you like, as I've said, I've tested my phone alongside a dedicated Golf GPS and matched it - a golf GPS which by its vary nature has to be accurate down to a yard or two. Zoomed in, my current location in google maps is absolutely bang on most of the time.

PS my proposed Raspberry Pi tracker is just a plaything I don't expect it to match, better or compete with professional products - I'm having a play! As for handing and compressing data - I've got over 25 years Application Development experience in just about every area you can shake a stick at, writing banking systems on a machine with a single 200Mhz processor and 8 Mb RAM which was expected to support many thousands of simultaneous users as well as handling terminal conversations and talking to an ATM network with 300 BAUD data links - Indeed the Raspberry Pi I'll be using is many times more powerful and has vastly more RAM than the $10m mainframes I started on. I can assure you I'm much better placed to understand tight coding and efficient data transmission that people brought up on today's memory-happy bloat-ware and super-fast transmission rates! The data transmission rates of a mobile phone today are faster than the main data trunks I was using 25 years ago - let alone the pitiful individual links to terminals and ATMs!
 
StuckAgainSteve said:
I'm much better placed to understand tight coding and efficient data transmission that people brought up on today's memory-happy bloat-ware and super-fast transmission rates! The data transmission rates of a mobile phone today are faster than the main data trunks I was using 25 years ago - let alone the pitiful individual links to terminals and ATMs!
Click to expand...

Blimey, you must be nearly as old as I am:) Leased lines in the banking system used to struggle at 1.2K baud in my day. My computer was 18 bit, had 32K of base memory and up to 8 further 32k banks, used to support up to 50 terminals with millisecond response times. All software written in octal notation long hand:D
 
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