Cheap 'Tracker'

[Richard A Thackeray]

This was on the MSN(?) homepage, as a link/feature

Anyone tried it?
It looks nice & simple, with just a buy outright, no monthly fees

Use an adhesive to locate it under a saddle (making sure that you can remove it, to get the cover off, for battery replacement)
http://www.thetrackr-uk.co.uk/#&panel1-1

The link I read first;
http://techiefans.com/is-your-own-c...vcnRhbWVkaWFsdGRzcGFpbi1zYw&sxid=d0c421ex58fj

 

[Milkfloat]

This (or the multitude of other useless trackers) gets questioned fairly often. It is not a tracker, just a bluetooth device, without a critical mass of people running a particular power hungry app on their phones it won't succeed.

 

[Richard A Thackeray]

As in a 'start-up' project, or 'piggybacking' a signal?

I speak as a reasonably old-fashioned 'techno-luddite'

 

[classic33]

As in a 'start-up' project, or 'piggybacking' a signal?

I speak as a reasonably old-fashioned 'techno-luddite'

It's up and running, have a gander at their site to get an idea of how many are in your area.

Early releases from them said that all it took was a phone/device with working Bluetooth to pick up the signal, passing the location onto the next device. And on and on.

 

[mjr]

It's up and running, have a gander at their site to get an idea of how many are in your area.

And then think how many will pass within 30m (closer if there are walls nearby, much closer if metal) of where a thief will hide your bike until the battery goes flat. From a previous discussion of that junk:

They don't seem to be selling well enough for the crowd facility to be worth a damn. And even that depends on what happens to "TrackR Inc".

Sorry, but I'm going to hammer this point home: even if all 4.5m have been sold in the EU and US and no-one bought multiple TrackRs (unlikely IMO), that's 4.5m out of a population of 835m or about half a percent. So let's say 5¼m people pass through Leicester Rail Station a year, that's an average of less than 17000 per non-Sunday, so maybe 85 Trackr users a day - and that's if the thief is dumb enough to leave the bike within 30m of the gateline of one of the 10th-ish city's rail station and all Trackr users are running the app when they pass through (and I'm not sure why they would unless they hate their phone battery life).

Park it in a back street half a mile away and I suspect it'll see one user every blue moon. Park it in a back garden in a market town and it may never see one. Put it in a container at a self-storage and wait to sell it at a Fresher's Fair the following autumn and the battery will probably have gone flat before it ever sees someone with that app.

It seems like a so-so way to locate stuff you've lost (but the Big Brother cloud/crowd tracking isn't needed for that), but it seems a bit rubbish for tracking stolen bikes even if you can hide it well.

If you think it's a good idea, can I tempt you with some elephant repellant for your bike too?