[peterandirene]

Has anyone seen the article in this months Caravan Club magazine about using an old mobile phone to keep tabs on your motorhome?

Basically the principle is to permanently wire in a switched on mobile phone and use a site like www.followus.co.uk to keep tabs on where the phone is, approximately.

Seems like a pretty cheap tracking system to me, anyone else have any thoughts?

Peter

 

[Road_Runner_644]

Hi Peter

I signed up with verilocation recently so i could use the system with the vans at work, maybe my kids phones, and put a spare payt phone in the MH for the tracking/security reason.

Its very quick, it works from the web or if you just txt the phone in question, but its not very accurate. The CC article mentions that it could be accurate when you are near a lot of phone masts, but i've found its accurate to about 1-3 miles.

So if the van got nicked - you could track it say 4 times in half an hour, and get the general location of where it was. you could get a better idea of where it was travelling if it was still on the move, as it would be popping up either side of the M1 on the web map if it was travelling down that particular motorway.

Its cute in a way, because you just name your phone, like dave or fred or in my van's case "RR" and just put RR in the find box, click and its comes back in seconds with a circle on a map.

There are promises on the web site of it getting more accurate, but it looks like that would involve getting a better phone.

Is it worth it? - for 50 quid a year for 5 phones and 35p a track, its not a lot of money to spend, but its not a real security system. I'm not that impressed with it but then again its not trackstar which i think is 300 quid plus 120 a year ish.

Cheers

Dave

 

[navman]

With Trackstar we can opted for the lifetime subscription which will save quite a few bucks if you intend to keep you van for a while like we do.

On the same topic dont forget to have some letter / numbers stuck on the roof. Not you post code ( as it could tell the crims where there is an empty house) Index would be fine....With CCTV cameras and Motorway monitoring cameras it helps the old bill get your vehicle back... :lol: