I bought one of these cheapo GPS trackers the other week, not expecting too much but as it was fairly cheap I thought I'd try it out to see what you get for your money.
I was fairly impressed to be honest.
Here's the little thing, they're all over eBay. I paid just under £40.
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Size wise it's abit smaller than a credit card, half inch thick or so. Inside there's a battery and space for a mobile sim card.
It's pretty simple to use, you slap in a PAYG sim with some credit and text commands to that number. It communicates back via SMS.
So does it work??
Well yes, it works great. You make a call to the tracker, it rings for abit then go's to answerphone. The tracker then sends you an SMS containing it's GPS co-ordinates as well as a googlemaps link.
This works really well if you have a smartphone, just click on the link and it brings up a map with the location.
The accuracy is alot better than I expected, the manual claims within 6m and it's bang on.
It doesn't take ages to get a fix either. Usually by the time you've put the phone down from calling it you already have the text containing the location.
It's able to receive gps signal hidden under fabric as well, which opens up the options or hiding it from view really nicely. If it's unable to give you a gps fix it will send you the location of the nearest phone tower. So if the car is taken inside a warehouse or whatever you've still got a rough idea of the area it's in.
There is also an option for continuous tracking, it will send you a location message every 30s.
I gave it a while and that works pretty well too, it even reports the speed it travelling. Accuracy was still good, even down to the side of the road being travelled on.
There's various security options, setting a geo-fence will allow it to move within a certain area, then msg when it leaves the area. I tried it but you need to set the area fairly wide as it alarms when it nears the edge.
The better option is one that will alert when it moves from within 200m of it's current location, this works really well.
When I set this I got a tracker message as soon as I got to the end of my road.
All in it's a pretty decent little thing, being self contained means there's no pissing around with wires for the install and as it's so small it's dead easy to hide.
The sellers will sell it with a charging unit to hardwire into the battery, it's a couple of quid extra so it's a good idea to get that. Having said that the battery that is currently in mine has lasted well over 72 hours and is still going strong.
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Originally Posted by skidder166
