Hi All.

I've had so much help from everyone here I thought I'd try to give a little back.

I work for a fleet management and vehicle telematics solutions comapny.
I'm a tech engineer so have a good working knowledge of the following...

GPS tracking (hardware & software)
Fleet management solutions
Sat Nav integration
Remote panic alarms
Lone worker solutions
Driver ID
OTA messaging
and much more.

So if anyone has any questions about GPS vehicle tracking or any of the other things I mentioned above then this is the thread for you. Just ask and I'll try and answer to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks guys

Andy

Hi MEP.

You don't ask for much do ya. lol

Unfortunately there are usually three types of cost involved in vehicle tracking.
1. Cost of Hardware/Installation
2. Sim contract/charges
3. Web interface subscription

Most tracking solutions companies will offer all three for a fixed installation price and then one monthly charge paid to them to cover web subscription and sim charges.

If you want to be able to track every journey you make in detail then the price goes up.
Basically, the more information you want your tracker to provide, the more data charges you will incur due to increased amount of data sent over the sim network.
So a compromise has to be made.

You can, but really don't want to, set up your own web interface because you have to buy the licence for the software, learn how to use it, how to configure your tracker so it reports to your host software and still have to buy the hardware and pay for sim charges.

The other and possibly cheapest option is to use what we call a 'hearbeat' tracker. A unit that simply reports its location once a day.
This is often the most popular choice for people just wanting a simple anti-theft tracking system. A company called Enfora make a nice little simple device for this called the Spider MT.
Unlike other trackers this is a fully self contained unit and can be installed by anyone anywhere in a vehicle. No wiring required at all. The device has an internal battery which, if your happy to stick to 1 report a day or less, will last for a couple of years. But the device still uses a sim so there would still be cost involved there.
Where you want the unit to report to and how you will access that information you would have to discuss with the hardware supplier.

Using pay-as-you-go sims is ok but not advisable. They tend to recieve a reletively high volume of ads via SMS which can have undesired effects on your tracker, if its not sophsticated enough to deal with incoming SMS messages. Most GPS trackers are fundamentally the same as mobile phones, but often the firmware that controls the modem and the modem itself may be relatively old or un-sophisticated.
So a 'data only' sim on contract with a good network is ideal if you don't mind entering into a contract for min 12 months.

Data only sims are relatively cheap, we get ours for £4 a month from Orange. Of course we mark them up a little for our direct customers but you should be able to find a similar or even cheaper deal if you shop around.

If you want to cut out all the middle men, one of our partner companies, Chameleon, who specialise in single end users, as opposed to large company fleets, offer their web interface at a cost of around £9 a month, which I think includes sim data charges. So for as little as £9 a month you could track your vehicle at all times.

They use our hardware. Specifically the WT5000 model. They also use our Web Interface, Quadrant, which looks like this...

[IMG]file:///C:/Users/adevine/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png[/IMG]

Tell em Andy @ Webtech sent you and they might be able to do you a deal.

In regards to using your aux output to connect to a tracker, this should be entirely possible.
Most trackers, and defiantely ours, have a number of inputs and outputs.
Inputs for collecting info from the vehicle and outputs to control eletrical systems on the vehicle.
Usually the outputs are simple switched GND's which you can use to earth an eletrical path to turn on or off a device on the vehicle such as immobiliser, door locks, windows, ignition, whatever you can wire it into. Inputs are usually just simple voltage detectors which monitor for voltage changes. If a voltage drops below or goes above a specified voltage then a record is generated by the tracker for that event.

If your aux output is simply a switching output then it could be connected direct to a trackers input and with the correct configuration on the tracker you'd be set to go.

However if you alarm outputs any kind of binary data out the AUX port then things could get a bit complicated for ya. You would have to make sure that the locator was compatible with the alarm. That it could process the data coming from the alarm and could send that data as a message extension of a standard record sent by the tracker. All in all you would probably need a good installer to do this for you as it goes beyond just connecting wires together.
It might be an idea to contact your alarm manufacturer to see if they recommend any particular tracking device to use as you require.

Pricewise for hardware £100-£150 is a reasonable price to pay for a tracker, but for a device on ebay from ching chong that seems quite a lot. You could pay about the same to a UK based company and that should include the installation too.

Our WT5000 entry level tracker, which also support 2 inputs, 2 outputs and a serial data connection on top of the standard tracking stuff is priced around this range.

But it depends on what you want your tracker to do.
You'd be surprised at what some are capable of and the prices they get up to.

Christ I'm bored writing so thats enough for now.

Cheers

Andy

All GPS/GPRS based tracking devices that use sim cards are able to respond to SMS messages.

There are a number of things that a tracker does to communicate it's information.
1. When the device first powers up at IGN on it will initialise its internal modem
2. Modem will then connect to the GSM network
3. Usually the modem will then look for a host IP address to open a GPRS data connection to, so it can send its information to a host server

Then, It's usually on the server that all the magic happens turning raw data and lat/longs into meaningful addresses, speeds, direction and plotting them on a map interface (called Geo-coding).

So to be able send SMS messages and recieve an immidate response what you can do is prevent the tracker from performing step 3 by not configuring a host IP address or just configure a junk one.
This way the tracker will just connect to the GSM network but not the GPRS host. You can then SMS the tracker and if you know the correct command to send you can pull back the lat/long data and if your clever enough much more.

The trick to this is that a tracker usually cannot accept incoming SMS messages while it is connected to a GPRS host. Again a limitation of using not the very latest GPRS hardware in GPS trackers.
Essentially the same as not being able to accept incoming calls on your mobile while you are using it to browse the web. Some more advanced and expensive trackers do not have this limitation.
Also you can send an SMS message to a tracker and if the tracker is powered off at the time, your message will queue on the network and be delivered when the tracker wakes up again.

This also means that you can SMS your tracker even if you do configure a host IP address and allow it to connect via GPRS to a host server. There is a gap between steps 2 and 3 where the tracker is connected to the GSM network but not yet to the GPRS host. At this point the tracker can respond to any queued SMS messages awaiting delivery.
So you could still send SMS messages and get a response even if the tracker still connects to a host, you just have to wait for the next time the tracker wakes to get a response.

So, if you really were a massive cheapskate ;-) and wanted the cheapest possible option.....yes you could buy a cheapy tracker, bang a pay-as-go sim in it with a bit of credit on, and install the tracker yourself. So then if you had the correct instruction you could just configure the network APN into the tracker for whatever network your sim is on, DON'T configure a host IP address, and then if you knew the syntax of the necessary commands, you could just send your tracker an SMS whenever you wanted, and it would report back its lat/long. You could then input the lat/long into google maps or something similar and hey presto you can see where your beast is on a map.

So no subscription charges, no sim contract, just the cost of the hardware and the occasional bit of credit on the sim. But a fair bit of knowledge required to install, configure and use.

Personally I think paying the little extra each month for a professional install, access to techical support and access to a nice mapping interface, with reporting, messaging and other features is well worth the expense. You may want the additional features offered for controlling the inputs/outputs of the tracker if you want to wire it to things like door locks or immobilisers.
But it makes sense to go for a complete professional solution especially if you buy a Thatchem Q certified (approved by insurance companies) GPS tracker and offset the cost of subscription against the savings to your insurance premiums.

Don;t ask me how much you'll save coz it's different with every insurer. But a bit of clever shopping and you could find a system that essentially pays for itself.
Probably a sensible thing to do before buying a tracker is to contact your insurer and ask them for a list of devices that they approve.
So even if you try for the chepy cheap pay as you go option I described above, you might still make a saving on your premiums. Unlikely tho if its not installed by a pro.

Hi Andy,
I need some info about a WT5000 on how to reset the unit's password and which pins are input and output for telemetry. If you can help please reply. btw I tried to contact support@webtech and no solution until now. Thanks!

Daniel
daniel.bpm@gmail.com

Originally Posted by Dogshark

Hi All.

I've had so much help from everyone here I thought I'd try to give a little back.

I work for a fleet management and vehicle telematics solutions comapny.
I'm a tech engineer so have a good working knowledge of the following...

GPS tracking (hardware & software)
Fleet management solutions
Sat Nav integration
Remote panic alarms
Lone worker solutions
Driver ID
OTA messaging
and much more.

So if anyone has any questions about GPS vehicle tracking or any of the other things I mentioned above then this is the thread for you. Just ask and I'll try and answer to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks guys

Andy