corradoboy

I understand you can now get mobile phones which can be located via text message. I was wondering about the feasability of secreting one of these somewhere in/under my car with a live feed from the battery, and using it as a back-up to the (easily located and removed) Tracker.

How much? Where from? Which phone? Which network?

OllyK

You can track any phone down but not by GPS, there are websites available that you can use for any phone. It uses triangulation from the nearest 3 antennae to calculate your position.

Subaru_WR1

Thats correct, and doesn't actually matter which phone so it will work with older ones as well...

Something I had thought about doing... cheap phone stick a sim in it and leave in the car... Endless possibilities like checking where your missus takes your car when she says she's just popping to the shops....

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

Interesting

AFAIK, no operator offers triangulation as a customer service. There are a number of services that offer "cell attached to" but the accuracy of those can vary from a few hundred metres to several miles depending on the size of the cell area - likely to be more accurate in town 'cos more cells etc.

The cost for these is between 10-50p a hit.

The usefulness of this for a home user is questionable. Where is my car? Well its somewhere in a 9 square mile area...



Location based services are set to take off in the near future with 3rd parties offering "nearest X to you when you txt this number" which will be premium rate and will give you an address to go to. It'll be a while yet before much more accurate.

I'm currently testing an XDA one that offers the same functionality but reports position periodically back to a base via GPRS - cheaper



For Corradoboy, your best bet would be to get something such as TrakM8 which you install, in addition to any other tracking device. You hide it and stick a P&G sim in. This uses GPS & means that you'll be actualy able to pinpoint your car down to sq metres as opposed to square miles.

corradoboy

So which websites do we use then ?

Big C

Sounds like a good idea and one I had thought about before.
This Mob seem to outline the technolgy already in place to do something similar on a subscription based sign-up.

I think I'll give it a bash!

C

Subaru_WR1

Puff.... Triangulation is already being used by Vodafone, although as a locate yourself service rather than locate another person/phone, although things like that are coming... and with in reason is quite accurate normally a few hundred yards although even that could prove quite difficult to locate a car if its in a garage so on...

I'm not sure about the other operators though i guess they have something similar...

From what I understand the people above basically pay the operator for the info on the basis that the mobile being located has agreed....

darlodge

My company (Breakdown recovery Service) has a program that links in with Microsoft Mappoint that you can locate a mobile phone down to street level.

I'm not sure how this would work with personal accounts but our corprate rate is about 6p per search (from what I remember).

You enter a mobile number and it tells you the street name they are on, nearest motorway junction, etc. From this information you can allocate the nearest recovery agent.

Have a look on google for mobile phone tracking sites.

Darren

Puff The Magic Wagon!

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C

I have already signed up to them, in order to research the competition...

In my case, I am currently located 2 miles further from their circle, which is about 6 miles in total from the base station concerned. There is no directional information, so as far as they are concerned, I could be 4 miles the other side of where I am, so their diameter is 8 miles. Thats a large space to lose a car & seeing as I'm outside the area...

That cost 50p as well to check.

Its the same data I'm using, except my product is not intended to accurately track a vehicle. I also do direction & signal strength

Also, if I drive upto the main road from where I am (1.5 miles), I change over 2 new cells, both of which whose centroid is not close to my position.

It is NOT accurate enough for vehicle location - be aware.

Puff The Magic Wagon!

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I forgot about your thing Darren

darlodge

Your system would be ideal Puff if we owned all our recovery Agents (Like the AA) but unfortunately we don't. As I mentioned before providing all our with agents PDA's would be very expensive and as our current method of allocating jobs works, spending that amount of money would not be cost effective even though we have just lost about 20% of our recovery agents recently due to the new PAS43 recovery standards.

We do not often do searches of lost member as they generally know where they are but there has been times when a member is totally lost on a back road in the middle of no where and we can search for them. I am not sure of the effectiveness of the search but we have always managed to get a recovery agent to them within our estimated time frame.

Check out Justfone

Darren

Puff The Magic Wagon!

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Darren

Are Justfone the peeps that do your stuff? Other than their Lone Worker option, which is hardware dependant (ie + cost), it would seem that they are using the same data as other companies that offer this service, with the same accuracy

Their FoneTrack software has MapPoint built in which goes DOWN to street level, but it would appear from the screenshots that "accuracy" of devices are measured in metres, some of which are several kilometres from cell tower

Obviously enough for what you need because finding the nearest operator to a point needn't be down to streetlevel and the accuracy variation would be within service levels offered to the client.

If its something else, please let me know, as it is of great interest to me at the moment.

Thanks