Vehicle Tracking: 6 Best Tips on How to Track a Car

Posted on by Sarath
a driver inside a car
28
Oct

Why tracking GPS location of car?

GPS location tracking enables you to track your vehicle location in real time from anywhere in the world. The technology itself is a great addition to protecting the car from theft and vandalism. Not only vehicle protection but it also helps to recover stolen vehicles easily. GPS trackers have the ability to real time vehicle tracking and can provide important alerts based on the location data. This helps further enhancing vehicle safety.

Track GPS Location of Car using GPS Tracking Device

Cars can be installed with GPS tracking devices for tracking purposes. You can use the login credentials to the online portal after installing a car tracking device. You can see the live location of your car in the online portal.

What’s happens here is that the vehicle tracking unit in the car sends out the location data of your car into the online portal in a specific interval of time. You need to understand that the location data from the GPS unit get processed before it gets displayed on your screen. For those purposes, it gets transferred first to a server in which the location data get processed and then send it to your device.

Installing a vehicle tracking device on a car

A tracking device can be installed in either of the any three ways after activation. The activation process depends on individual company policies and procedures.

  1. Device that requires connection directly to the car battery: In this type of tracking units, the leads from tracker device should be carefully connected to the car battery. Make sure that both car terminals and tracker device terminals are of same kind (positive to positive and negative to negative)
  2. Device that has inbuilt battery: In this type, the tracker unit take power from the inbuilt battery. Some devices also have magnetic back panel so that you can stick it in any metallic place. Generally, you can place the tracker anywhere inside the car after successfull activation.
  3. Tracker device that connected to OBD Port: Some tracking systems can be connected to the OBD port of the car. It is easy plug and play procedure. Once you place the device in the OBD port it will start sending the location data after successful activation.

Track location using smartphone

If you have an old smartphone, you can turn it into a GPS location tracker to track a car. Smartphone’s have inbuilt GPS receiver which can be used for this purpose. There are several ways to create a tracking unit from smartphones. In all those methods, you need to keep the smartphone in your car, and it must have connection to the internet.

  1. Live location sharing on WhatsApp: This method requires internet connection and an active WhatsApp account on the smartphone. On the chat bar, you can share live location to your personal WhatsApp number.
  2. Location sharing on google map: Google map also allows you to share the live location with others. On your old smartphone you can set this up using the Google map app. Goto the menu and select the location sharing feature.
  3. With PAJ Mobile Tracker App: Download PAJ Mobile Tracker app from Google Play or Apple store on your old smartphone. Make sure that the old smartphone has internet connection. On this app register an account for free. Now download PAJ Finder portal on your actively using phone. Login to the finder portal using the credentials from old smartphone. Now the old smartphone’s location data will be shared with your phone in real time.

Advantage of GPS trackers compared to tracking using smartphone.

Smartphone tracker is not recommended for theft prevention. Smartphones are easily noticeable to intruders, and they can simply remove it from the car. Also, the smartphone tracker has regular Sim cards which may lose network connection while travelling remote locations. The battery life of a smartphone has at most 2 days in standby mode which is also a concern for continuous tracking.

GPS tracker on the other hand have so many features that help the car owner prevent the theft. It also nullifies the disadvantages of smartphone trackers. Unlike smartphones, the GPS trackers are small, and it can be placed secretly inside the car. If anyone try to remove the device from the battery source such as car battery or the OBD port, the tracker device immediately informs the owner via Alerts. The network connection in GPS trackers is strong because of the M2M Sim cards installed in it. It hardly goes out of network coverage area because of these special sim cards. The battery life for devices having it is own battery is 90 days in sand by mode, so car owners doesn’t have to recharge the device often. PAJ GPS devices are built with advanced security features and regularly updated to prevent any potential PAJ GPS data breaches.

Importance Alerts in a Car Tracking Devices

Alerts are important when it comes to GPS tracker. They send important vital information about the car’s whereabout. It is a proactive method to prevent the car theft. Common alerts are geofencing, Speeding alert, vibrational/shock alert, ignition alerts. As the name explains, each of the alerts uses cars attributes such as speed, location, engine status etc. A tracking alert can be received in a smartphone, PC or tablet via push notification and emails. It is important to have the App installed in the devices and logged in into respective accounts to receive alerts. Finder Portal from PAJ GPS has user friendly design and fast response time.  The global network coverage enables the PAJ trackers to act immediately by providing instant alert into the end user. It is important to have a global coverage and speed because it helps recover the car fast in case of theft attempt.