Ontrak Position Tracking Device review

[MikeB]

Got an expensive car or other “mobile” asset you don’t want to lose? Well to lose a car is careless, but in this day and age theft is a major threat. One gadget to consider is the GPS tracker device made by OnTrak.

Mike Alder has got his tool kit out and has wired up the Ontrak PTD to his car. Click here to read the review.
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Mike Barrett

[iwondery]

If my car is stolen and this ontrak device simply gives me the latitude & longitude, it may take some time to reverse geo-code them to real location (as in address). Suppose I'm out in the rural area, how can I find internet connection within such a short time ? By the time, my car would have already been stripped to the core !

[Tim Buxton]

Why would you need an internet connection? Take a laptop with Autoroute on it, put the coordinates in and 'bingo'.
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Tim

[mikealder]

Don't forget the device also informs you of the distance/ bearing to the nearest motorway junction in the SMS, this can be used to very quickly home in on the rough location, if you have TomTom on the PDA or have a pod type device you can enter the lat/ long in directly.

I appreciate your point about being able to see the tracker location on a map, it can be done via the internet with this device, but I am not too sure (yet) about displaying position on a PDA/ phone in the same way - Mike

[coastersteve]

Hi there,

I work on the design team for the On-Trak unit and we take you comments about the long and lat onboard, however licencing map data is not cheap, not cheap at all. We have looked at reverse geocoding services where we issue a long and lat to them and they return an XML response containing the a full street address. Multimap do have a service like this - but it is quite a price.

We used motorway junctions because we feel they're more meaningful than towns, for eg do you know where Bedworth is? (WITHOUT CHEATING!) but if it said your car 2 miles north of jnc3 of the M6 you would instantly have a good idea where that is as most people know where the motorway systems run so we used that.

You can enter the long and lat at our website and it'll return back a map, using google maps where you can see where your car is.

At the Pocketgpsworld show we'll be demostrating a more "live" version :D

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