ok peeps
i am going to get a tracker fitted after reading about too many cars being nicked lately.
seen them ranging from £50 on ebay to crazy money
what do you guys reccomend and whats the best value for money???
can they all be tracked by me or are they tracked by a company???
are they all subscription????
what do you know guys
thanks in advance
steve

 

I'd also like to know this.

 

most systems are activated by the alarm company after the vehicle has been stolen, there is a tracker fitted inside most police cars which can home in on the vehicle from a few miles away. The downside is that most trackers are activated to late, or the police havent their tracker activated (it involves them actualy looking for your car and getting out and attaching the unit to the roof of the patrol car)

high end system will let you track the vehicle yourself, immobilise it and even call the car though the speakers and shout at the twoc'ing cunts

 

Trackstar is the better one, can pinpoint your car to a certain street. Tracker is more hit and miss.

 

The downside is that most trackers are activated to late,and mostly are fitted in cars in the same 4 or 5 places so easy to rip out if you know what your looking out for

Clifford blackjax has its pros and cons

But it's worth the money

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVuaurrIm8M

 

there are home made systems that are baically a mobile fone you can go online and see alsorts on it too

worth a look, its just a powered feed to a mobile which can be put most anywhere and you havea couple of days even if teh battery is removed

thats all i know

 

Supply ONLY CLIFFORD Car Jacking module
Compatible with CLIFFORD G5 alarm systems only
Carjacking Response & Vehicle Recovery System
BlackJax is Clifford’s unique anti-carjacking response system that puts personal safety first while using innovative advancements to ensure that users can recover the vehicle themselves. If an armed car thief approaches – whether at a stoplight or in a parking lot (where most carjackings occur) – immediately turn over the keys and remote and let Clifford technology take over.
BlackJax is fully automatic: no buttons or transmitters to push when a gun is involved. Just get away from the vehicle. BlackJax allows the criminal to drive away a safe distance. Then, a few seconds later, BlackJax blares the siren and flashes the lights to alert other drivers and witnesses. It then pulses down the ignition system to safely force the vehicle to slow to a complete stop. Siren blaring and lights flashing, unable to restart the engine, the carjacker has no choice but to abandon the vehicle.
BlackJax offers immediate vehicle self-recovery. With the vehicle immobilized a short distance away, the owner can recover it. No special tracking units, monthly fees or per-use charges. Just follow the sound of the BlackJax siren, then enter the PIN code. That’s it – it’s sabotage-proof. The only way to turn off BlackJax is with a secret user-selectable PIN code. If the carjacker tries guessing codes at random, BlackJax actively ignores his code entries for the next few minutes. Even if he were to find and remove the BlackJax control unit, he would still be unable to restart the engine. That’s Clifford technology you can count on.

http://www.clifford.co.uk/Products/Accessories.aspx

 

Ive personally used the below:

http://www.eurocarparts.com/ecp/p/ca...1120&0&cc5_785

the interface is really easy to use, and it does the normal fancy things (sends youe text/emails with updates etc)

If its lost or stolen, the Road Angel team black out the screen and liase with the local police to recover it

If anybody wants to see the GUI in person, drop me a PM as we have a test account which used to be fitted to a test vehicle

 

I wanna be able to track myself aswell as a company track it. As I'm sure I would be more keen to find the car than they would. So would the car full of tooled up thugs I would take with me whilst tracking the stolen vehicle

 

Haha - if you didnt report it, then you could do the above - Although its not recomended

 

a guy down the bottom of out road used to have performance cars, always had trackers on them, but he had 2 evos and an m5 stolen and couldnt be tracked..... tbh im not interested in a tracker, ive heard of more incidents where the car is lost with a tracker on than of recovered cars due to the tracker.....

 

in todays technological days im surprised there isn't a relatively simple option of leaving a disposable mobile in the car and being able to track that.

 

old style nokia with auto answer.. use a hands free kit you can hear them talking about where they are going and what they gonna do with it ..
or .. fit a hidden carkit and remote speaker .. fone it up and swear at the cunts as u go

although we have agood one in our vans .. had a 5am start one morning .. been driving for 5 mins tops and get a fone call asking me did i know where my van was ...

 

I run a fleet and we have NAVMAN trackers ther mint, can see ever move they make and speed, locations etc. we pay 80p per vehicle per day which i think is about the rate if you hire 1. you can buy them out right but not sure how much they are, ours are on 3 year contracts but if you were to seel your car in this time all they do is swap it to the next vehicle.

In your own private car though id say there not really worth the money, unless you live in some crime hotspot and there going missing every night? maybe then think about it.

 

WHY and HOW would a tracker equipped car be MORE likely to be lost, on that basis that must mean plod are finding more that DON'T have trackers, sorry but it's biggest load of shit I've read today.
Having just checked, last year 96.9% of car reported stolen with a RAC Trackstar fitted were recovered within 30 minutes, independant figures, the TOTAL recovery rate was 98.1%.
The RAC trackstar tracks 24/7 so every second of EVERY journey is known, NOT just when activated, if the signal is lost it knows the last position, it can be traced down to about 30-50 feet.
tabetha

 

what do you mean by that?? if the phone is stolen or compromised, a thief cant track your car??

or do you mean if you report it stolen, YOU the owner cant track your car??? If thats the case i would see that as a massive negative if they stop me tracking MY car once its stolen. With a decent text response alarm and such a tracker, its likely the owner can respond with a friend far quicker than the police can. Retaking your own stolen car isnt a crime AFAIK.

 

has anyone here ever had a car nicked and then tracked it themselves???

 

you need a good smart phone ideally to do it, so you can see the position on a map. Its not as good as live updating that many of the proper tracker services do, so it can be hard to follow a car thats all over the shop and being driven to evade you as you usually cant update fast enough. Good if they are unalerted to being followed as you can usually update quick enough to follow thier general direction along main roads and be close behind when they pull up.

 

so you can ring the car and talk through the speakers,you can immobilise it by txt so i hear,although id like to think it was immobilised automatically,can i send a txt to it to switch the horn on constantly????
that would attract some attention

 

i personally use a gps tracker with a sim card fitted, just ring it and it sends you the long and lat via text message, nice and small, i cant recommend them enough, in fact i will be fitting them to my car and van when i get one

 

I used to fit trackers for about 11 years and the only one i would have would be 'Tracker' the problem with all other trackers is they rely on the gsm network to communicate with the operating centre now this bit of kit************************************will block all gsm coverage so the tracker can't send the information it's getting from the gps to the operation centre, where as the 'Tracker' product can communicate through VHF (very high frequency) which you can not block. As mentioned above the police can ONLY track 'Tracker' products using there on board display. VHF can also see through metal (containers) concerte (underground car parks). VHF is not as accurate as gps but with both its a great product. My car has a clifford cat 1 stand alone clifford black jax and a Tracker.

 

after reading that it would be a tracker on my shopping list, what price are they?

 

the problem with trackers is there is a tool available you can scan cars with that will alert a theif to the fact the car bike plant etc is trackered up,thats why you sometimes see high end cars ripped apart and slashed around in the attempt to remove the tracker.
oh and you can also buy tracker jammers for peanuts

 

who ever told you that is talking complete crap a tracker will lay dorment and do nothing until pinged by the secure operating centre or owner if they have the facility to do so via text message or internet. As they use gsm and gps signals this so call tracker scanner could possibly pick up mobile phones or satnavs as trackers. The tracker jammers are gsm blockers as stated above you cannot jam VHF which 'Tracker' use on all it's stolen vehical recovery systems.

 

tracker is suposed to be very good! got my friends car back and the thief arrested!

 

Hi Warren,

There is no phone in this. The tracker is a black box unit (can be hidden in the engine bay, roof lining, boot or dash) and simply uses 3 wires (power, earth and switching live)

If stolen (ie/ started without the key) or if the vehicle leaves your pre-set 'proximity fence' the unit will text & email you a warning.

If you report it stolen to Road angel they will black out your screen (for what they say is security purposes, as the Police dont want you to be able to follow your car and dish out your own punishment.

If you dont report it - you could drive along with a iphone or laptop with 3g and track the vehicle in real time.....


Im quite sure any tracking company (AA/RAC) will do the same (for safety purposes.

 

Hey dude can you explain to Marv the product below,i'm not certain if its the right one but i have had someone tell me they can scan for all trackers if they have been activated

http://***********************************

the detectors Marv was reffering to work only upto approx a 10 mtrs radius and can apparently work out whats closest.

 

didn't renton have his ml pinched recently and that got recovered via tracker didnit it?

all our vans are tracked 24/7, tells you how fast they are going, if they brake to hard and all sorts of shit (like if they have deviated from their route for the day ) but there is a new system they are trailing called 7 smart or something? tells you where the motor is all the time AND it's trackable over the internet

also, hulk hogan had all his motors tracked and he could check them on the internet and owuld call his kids up and ask them where they were and how fast they were driving but plenty of yank parents have stuff fitted to their cars so they know where their kids are so i'm not sure why its not come across the pond

 

I thought it would be some pathetic excuse like that.

thats why i will stick with having my 2 trackers. covered for every eventuality then. Tracker can refuse to tell me anything if they want and i will just live track my other tracking unit.

Might get a third externally hidden unit. Wont be able to jam that as its outside the farraday cage that is the shell.

those GSM/GPS trackers are not very good, they only kill the signals inside the shell and from when i played around with one, if the aerial is close enough to a window it still wont stop the car getting a gps fix on the later gen 2 and gen 3 satellites that have slowly replaced the old GPS satellites; the jammers are targetted on the frequencys used on the early gen 1 GPS systems. the battery powered ones are expensive and the cigarette lighter ones rely on you having a cigarette lighter in the car......

 

They don't jam the gps signal the ones i have seen jam the gsm so the tracker can't send the location information that it recieves from the gps.

 

still wont stop the VHF homing phil. plus the gps blocking only works on the early gps satellites and as long as your using a modern gps unit (NOT some cheap chinese unbranded shit) there will still likely be enough mix of the later satellites whose frequencys are not affected to get a gps fix.

 

come on yes or no?, can you with a 25$ product from ********.com find that a vhf tracked car that has the tracker armed for example its been reported stolen works ? thus meaning the asian gentleman who told me this was infact correct

 

ive got an original tracker on mine, but cant see the point in getting it activated.

1 it doesnt have GPS or anything like that so surely whats the point?
2 The car is worth so little nowadays is it worth it financially
3 car insurance covers me for theft, so fucking what if it gets nicked

 

No they won't stop VHF tracking which is why i would only have a VHF and gps tracker. The blockers i have seen do NOT BLOCK GPS they only block the gsm signal the gps will work the tracker will be able to see where it is but will have no way of communicating with the operating center as it will have no gsm(mobile phone network) coverage the reason they use this is because it works theses products were designed for use in hospitals libarys and doctors surgerys etc.

 

Marv would rather take precautions like leaving the car somewhere safe or in a garage hidden away than trust a lousy tracker that can be found and ripped out by a robber with a *************

 

you dont understand gps very well...

the civilian available frequencys are currently based on 2 seperate frequency groups with a third in development. the early civilian GPS used whats known as the L1 frequency band.

In simple terms the early civvy GPS network uses a message that contains 3 core bits of info, satellite time/date info, emphemeris data (wherethat satellite is in orbit NOW), and almanac data (rough positions of all satellites).On top of that is a coarse/aquisation code which in essence helps you calculate the "offset". Then the computer once its locked onto 3 satellites (2d fix) and 4 or more satellites (3d fix) it uses the data to calculate a position.

it is more complicated than that in reality as its all the signals are modulated onto a carrier wave so have to be demodulated and broken down, errors calculated etc etc etc before you even get to the point of calculating a position.... but google if you want to know more

now the good old US has upgraded the civvy GPS to use the L2 frequency which does not use a CA code but uses two data streams to do ranging and hence offsets. so works slightly different as well as being on a different frequency.

most new GPS recievers use a combination of both frequencys and methods to get better positional accuracy and faster fixs.

most newer GPS recievers have anti-jam capabilities and sufficient redundancy to get past most basic GPS jammers.

Almost all jammers are focused on the L1 frequency. Especially anything you and I (and more importantly criminal scum) can afford. Anything sub £200 (including the ebay jammers) arfe simple continous wave jammers operating on the L1 frequency.

most modern GPS units can filter out continous wave jamming on the L1 frequency unless the signal is very strong or directly in line of sight of satellites.

the better jammers that cost several hundreds use noise generation on the L1 frequency and hence are much more effective.

Even so their range is very limited due to the very low power of these types of devices. It doesnt help that most are based on cigarette power supplies so low down in car, and its 50/50 whether the aerial is high up or low down. It will be minimally effective on a high up GPS aerial. But they can be quite effective on low down GPS units such as cheap/older units or the magnetic undercar trackers (which is what they were designed for countering really).

all this wont effect L2 frequencies so the GPS will still get a fix in quick order due to stored C/A data and alamanac data. Such jammers would only slow down a fix on L2 frequency for a cold start on a GPS unit thats got no data whatsoever in it.

of course none of this effects the precise positioning systems or the p-code military systems.

GPS tracking and electronic warfare against both jammers and GPS is a very interesting subject... some of the latest kit uses either electronically or physically steerable phased array aerials that can remove all ground interference for advanced anti-jamming meaning youd need an aircraft with a jammer to stand a chance at all of jamming such modern devices. However thats a bit beyond the scope of car usage and generally reserved for top level civvy and mostly military usage.

oh and most people dont realise that one of the other uses of the GPS satellites is to detect nuclear missile launches and detonations as part of the US defence network. Thats a small part of how in the nuclear war films NORAD can see where all the missiles come from and detonate cool or what???
Blocking the GSM network is much much easier.

however similar limitations apply to the units used. GSM jammers sited inside a car will have little/no effect on an underbody tracker and limited impact on a higher up GSM aerial or a GSM aerial sited outside the main cabin.


So jamming GSM and GPS isnt as simple as a £20 chinese piece of crap off ebay as people think. Its hit and miss both for us the car owner and them the thief. Thats why its common for them to dump the car or try and find the tracker as they know they cant defeat them all.

the best defence as phil says is a layered defence of a tracker that uses GPS, GSM AND VHF as even if the maniacs have dual GSM and GPS jammers they still will never stop the VHF.

 

One of the large security companies I think it is securicor uses VHF tracking - this is because is very hard to stop. Realistically if some one is very determined they will get your car. Thieves have been known to point a gun at you, your child or your partner and who wouldn’t hand over the keys and tell them how to start it.

But if I can all make it as hard as possible for thieving scum to take my pride and joy I will and do so. Layer the security if possible so they have to get round multiple security devices to take it.

 

Anti-hijack is a whole thread on its own

 

To be totaly honest a theif that will go the extent of using jammers and jarjacking aint gonna nick a 20 year old sierra they are going for bentley mercs bm's etc. Some little cock that wants to take your 20 year old cossie for joy ride wouldn't care if it had a tracker or not.

Form doing car security for nearly 12 years i highly recommend the clifford black jax along with a cat 1 and a Tracker locate. thats what i've got. oh and a steering wheel lock thing(big yellow job that covers the steering wheel). The secuirty i have on my car will keep it safe from a opertunist theif/joy rider but if someone really wants it there'll get it.

 

yes or no would of sufficed Dude but have one of these anyway