DIY Trackers
Author
Discussion

therealpigdog

Original Poster:

2,592 posts

227 months

Wednesday 17th August 2011
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Search down, so can't see if this has been covered, but don't remember seeing it recently.

Has anyone used a DIY tracker such as this?

I know that it probably won't count towards any insurance discount, but having had a friend suffer the theft of his M3 recently and the total inability of the police to recover it (despite it driving under their noses several times irked) something like this would have let him be able to do something.

I know it won't be as good as a proper professional tracker, but for £40 it makes more sense on lesser value cars. I've just ordered one to put on my caravan (getmecoat) to give me some piece of mind as it can text me whenever it leaves the secure storage area.

Given that it uses both mobile telephone masts and GPS, it should mean that it can be traced even if they use a jammer (only £80 on ebay yikes).

Any experiences/thoughts?


sorry - appear to have gone smilie-tastic this afternoon.

bobda

1,442 posts

264 months

Wednesday 17th August 2011
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Pay as you go phone + hard wired car charger + http://www.followus.co.uk/

smile

KingNothing

3,341 posts

183 months

Wednesday 17th August 2011
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They're fairly accurate, upto about 20m majority of the time, thing is though you really need it hardwired in to provide constant power, otherwise the battery will die eventually, unless you take it out to charge it all the time.

You're right, it does nothing for insurance purposes, as it's not even a recognised system, basically just a DIY job for extra piece of mind, so if your car goes walkabouts, you can text it, get latitude and longtitude, bung it into google maps, and inform the police, you car is either parked in such a such area, or was last known to be in certain area, you obviously have to hide it in a decent place.

Can also set it to go off after it starts going faster than a certain speed, so when you leave your car for a service, and get a text flashing up saying your cars currently going 100mph, might give you some evidence to get a free service, haha.

frosted

3,549 posts

207 months

Wednesday 17th August 2011
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Chuck in a £80 apple iPhone 3GS in there somewhere , "Mobile Me" and there you go, car is tracked . I recently had to use mobile me and it was frickin excellent

Edited by frosted on Wednesday 17th August 17:12

volks al

4,112 posts

244 months

Wednesday 17th August 2011
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Decent bits of kit, can be fiddly to set up the sms commands as have to be exactly right, and you need to know the PAYGO sms message numbers and GPRS settings for web based tracking, other than that as mentioned get a hardwire kit for it. That is a fake copy too of the original xexun tk-102 tracker, sometimes the commands are different and there is not the web support for the gprs tracking side of things. Find a genuine seller on ebay, there is one I used and his page shows you genuine vs fake tracker copies.

this is the version two, with sd card back up for data logging

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/100-original-XeXun-GPS-T...

and this is the v1 model and seller I brought from, very good service and replaced my first one, as I locked it by sending duff gprs commands and they get stuck in data loop you and only reset with a cable and SW frown

Edited by volks al on Wednesday 17th August 17:17