Some Security Questions, GPS Tracking

ASSISTANCE Electrical & Entertainment Systems
1

Okay so I just bought a second G2, this one is now going to be my summer car and my old one is now going to be my winter car.

My summer G2, due to the engine/transmission and the rims I’m putting on it, it is going to be a huge target for being stolen. Now I don’t live in a bad area, but sometimes I will be parking in sketchy areas.

Anyways the car currently has a good $500 USD 2-way alarm in it, just using a shock sensor at the moment, it was installed professionally before I bought the car. I’ve been told shock sensors are pretty useless all around though lol. But I’m going to talk to a specialist about this alarm and see if I can plug in a more useful sensor or not etc.

What I mainly want to ask about on here, is what options are available for GPS tracking for our cars? I’ve only ever really heard of LoJack, but I don’t even know if thats available where I live yet… So what other options are there? if any…

I have a method that I thought of on my own that I could easily use. I will explain. Due to where I work I get 50% off any Bell cell phone plan I want. So I can get an iPhone on a $50/month plan for only $25/month and it includes a 500 MB data plan. Now, there is a jailbroken application called Longitude, which automatically updates the phone’s location to Google Latitude every 5 minutes is currently the most frequent interval you can set.

So if I were to hook up an iPhone on that plan solely for this purpose, it would cost me a one time fee of $100 for the iPhone on the 3 year contract and $28/month after tax for the plan, and $20 for an iPhone car charger. I could then wire in an extra cigarette lighter and hook up the iPhone car charger and keep the iPhone plugged in all the time so whenever the car gets driven it will recharge the iPhone. And the iPhone’s battery won’t even be draining that quickly anyways. Because this application runs in the background and all it does is update the phone’s location every 5 minutes, not battery intensive at all. So yeah I could hide all the wiring and the iPhone and then voila I have my own GPS tracking for my car.

I can login into Google Latitude and see exactly where my car is if it were ever to get stolen because the iPhone’s GPS is insanely accurate. The best part is, I could even login into Google Latitude from my personal iPhone and track the phone while driving after it, obviously the 5 minute update interval isn’t the most practical thing for this but its better than nothing lol, far better.

So I’m bouncing this idea around and also I want to learn more about my other options.

2

saw this in another thread

http://www.sdrev.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7574&highlight=tracker
cheaper.

its pay by the usage so no contracts and if you dont want to afford it this month (when the cars in the shop or broken) you dont have to.

its also not a wasted use of an iPhone (if you would say they are even useful in the first place)

and it updates every minute.

3

that is a very good alternative but boost mobile is not available up here in Canada so I don’t know if there is another phone up here that I could use in the same way

4

I looked at this a little while ago.

http://www.rmtracking.com/gpsproducts/vehicle_recovery/smart_tracker.php

5

that thing looks pretty good, not too expensive either, would definitely need to get the backup battery though or it could potentially be pretty useless, but i like how they have the payments set up only use when you need to. thats very cool i’m going to read that website more in depth when i have more time for sure

6

try computrac by compustar.com very nice piece

7

Glad I saw this thread since my ride was just recovered from being stolen and am looking into new prevention/recovery items.

That locater does look pretty tempting.

8

all of these look like a great alterntive to the $700 lojack I had that did’NT work:bored: