Bike Tracking

[Irish Motorcycle Adventures]

Just wondering if anyone had any experience with GPS/GSM trackers. We would like to fit a system to our bikes which would give us live tracking on something like Google maps if a bike gets nicked. It needs to work in both North & South. We are looking at Mtrack and CATS-I and i was wondering if anyone could comment.

 

[essjay]

I was looking at developing a similar system myself a couple of years ago but after some research I decided it's wouldn't be that good for a couple of reasons:

1) GPS is useless in the back of a van.
2) The whole system is useless if the battery is disconnected unless you have a back-up battery, which itself wouldn't last long trying to hold a GPS signal and send data over GPRS.

To be honest I've not looked at either of the mentioned systems so maybe they've overcome the issues above. Must have a look now actually.

Best bet might be a system that uses GSM base station triangulation as a backup to GPS.

 

[Irish Motorcycle Adventures]

The modern systems seem to take a three pronged approach namely GSM tower location, GPS if the unit can see the sky and RF to pinpoint the final exact location with a handheld scanner if the bike is in a building. It all sounds great on paper but I would love to hear from someone who has tried it in practice.

 

[Loiq]

does tracker not work in the north then?

we've used a satilite system to keep an eye on assests mainly abroad, it's expensive espically if the kit is highly mobile. the boxes are about he size of BIG mobile and batteries last well a long time if you only send once a day but you'd need to have them ping every 20-30 minutes probably more.

there are fleet solutions with are used on big trucks, boats and stuff like that

hope that helps