Mobile phones can be used to track vehicles - if you know the phone number.

Question: Is there any way to track a vehicle by placing a GPS emitter on it and picking up the satellite signal via the internet to determine its location?

There would be horrendously expensive commercial solutions to this. Wondering if there is a lower cost solution to the problem. Perhaps a commercially produced single emitter with a single code that always shows up on an internet map?

its not expensive. basic kits with google maps are $130. we even have a little GPS that you attach to a horses. if the horse is away from a home in a remote field. the owner can set the field area on google and if the horse is stolen or gets out of the field it sends alarm with google maps on the location.


gps use to be expensive

Thanks for your comments Tom. I was aware of a device that attaches to a vehicle which has to be removed from the vehicle to download information.
It would be useful if the device you mention could be left on a vehicle (or a horse) for a few weeks or months to determine movement patterns. I am totally clueless about this area of surveillance.

Does anyone know of a name of a device that is user friendly and basically just works?

hi. there GPS why do you need to remove it ??? it defeats the object if you need to find the stolen car or horse. to then find out were its been.
we use snooper.

Car truck tracker




Pet tracker.

Thanks so much for that Tom.
I've PM-ed you about why I'd need to remove it.
I'll look into the Snooper product now...

Ouch! Snooper battery life only 72 hours. I should have mentioned this is covert. There are quite a few trackers advertised; most of which look like hardwired jobs. A covert tracker would benefit from the longest battery life possible. I had an old Nokia phone that could go about eight days without the battery failing. Almost wish I could strap that to the undercarriage of a car... Nope, that'll never work. Better take another look at the Snooper again.

If you could get away with something just logging the GPS data internally without having to constantly send the position, it would last far longer... or even just something that sends position logs once a day or so - it's the wireless radio that really sucks the power.

I had an app on my older Windows Mobile phone that was great for this, and they have a live tracking/monitoring service to go with it: http://gpsed.com/monitoring/about - it could log the GPS track and upload at predetermined intervals - not just the current position, of course, but the track to that point. Alas, I'm on an Android phone now and they don't have an Android app. Really liked this one, was so simple to work with.

BTW, it doesn't really work that way - GPS devices don't transmit back to the GPS satellites. GPS works by the geostationary satellites all broadcasting a synchronized clock signal; the receiver simply picks up multiple signals and calculates its position based on the differences in timing. If the satellites are in known fixed positions, and your signal shows you're receiving the signal from satellite A a fraction sooner than satellite B, the receiver can then calculate that you're a known distance closer to A than to B.

A tracker or locator requires some other sort of transmitter - most common these days would something that uses a cellular wireless connection (GSM, 3G, HSPA, whatever). Very little data is actually required to be transmitted.

The US Supreme Court recently heard a case regarding police use of GPS trackers for surveillance, and determined that it amounted to a search, which required a warrant:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 73358.html

This case would complicate someone's position if they were to place a tracking device on a vehicle without the owner's knowledge.

Anyway, they tracked this guy for 4 weeks. I can't imagine they had someone changing the battery once or twice a week, but you never know. It would be easy enough to attach to part of the car's electrical system if you did a little homework first. Even just connecting to a brake light wire would allow it to charge whenever the brakes were applied, which could easily keep a low power GPS running indefinitely. The display uses a lot of power on commercial GPS', and these devices wouldn't have displays.

You'd also need to look at the broadcast capabilities of the unit. If it constantly broadcast its location to the trackers, that would use a lot more power, but if it were designed to wake up and transmit on a certain signal or send bursts hourly/whatever, you'd save a lot of power.

Would be easy using Scotchloks:



Build the device with a magnet connected to it ground, and you can just stick to it any exposed metal and tap in a single wire to power it from any lighting feed, as you suggest.

You could also build something with an internal dynamo to keep its battery charged - kind of like those flashlights you shake to power, or watches that stay powered from the movement of your arm through the day.

There seem to be two fundamentally different types of Tracker. I'm in no position to say, but I think a device exists which 'logs internally'. It would have to be removed from the vehicle to download the data, but I guess it wouldn't make that much difference when I think about it. If a tracker cannot be covertly wired to a brakelight cable etc, then it would have to be removed to be recharged every few days anyway. So maybe an internal logger might be the simplest solution.

The second type of tracker does not log internally; it, as Soundy points out, sends a signal or message back to a network.
A tracker with a Neodymium magnet + lithium battery + GSM etc could be attached to the underbody steel of a vehicle.


I thought the Patriot Act circumvented a lot of that.

soundy has got it right. we use kinetic changers lots out there and cheap. ....... the only problem with hardwire when doing covert stuff is on cars over the last few years things like stop lights and lights is most cars have Resistance Measurements which tell you if you have a bulb out

you can track most mobile (cell) phones with this software. just pick your country enter mobile press search and see if it finds you.


http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/sat-gps/

Tom, dunno if you're trying to be funny or whatever, but this web address leads to a pornographic prank.

Pity it hadn't been the other way round with some bloke taking it up the ar$#

The Gotek Sniper Tracker claims 40-50 days battery life. That would probably round down to a fortnight in the field. Retails for $439 US. Gotek is a US company located in MA.

They claim each magnet can resist 27 kilos of lift. Must be the Neodymium magnets that I previously mentioned.

http://gotek8.com/sniper-unit/

we use u-traq from uplink. small unit just plugs into the obd plug under the dash where they plug the computer in to do diagnostics on vehicle.