Car tracking devices commonly use one of 3 different technologies to locate the target  they can use the
 
Radio Direction system that simply finds the direction a radio transmitter fitted from the target is coming from and by triangulation can give a accurate position these systems are often used for falconry and although fairly accurate are quite expensive, cumbersome and limited in range.
 
GSM tracker units utilize mobile phone networks and mobile phone location services to report their positions on request. GSM tracking is not suitable for street level tracking but will show you the area that it is in with reasonable accuracy. One of the main factors that affects GSM tracking  is how many phone masts are nearby towns are much better than the countryside in this respect for network coverage.

GPS  (Global Positioning System) uses 24 satellites travelling in 6 orbital paths around the Earth at a distance of 12,600 miles. These satellites transmit a low power signal The pattern of their orbit is calculated so that a GPS receiver on the earth’s surface is always ‘visible  to at least 4 of these satellites.From these 4 satellite transmissions your GPS Tracker can work out your location. This is the same system used by car sat nav systems and is extremely accurate

With the exception of the GSM tracker all of our trackers use GPS location technology

Car trackers can be split into 2 types

Data loggers which records the historic data every few seconds and stores this in its onboard memory for download to your PC at a later date, with this type of device the logger needs to be removed from the target and plugged into your PC via the USB port to download the data and view via the mapping software.

Live trackers  this type of tracker reports back in real time giving you coordinates by text message in the case of our covert satellite tracker. or on a  real time moving map display with our other trackers using GPRS to report its position as often as every 5 seconds

GPRS - General Packet Radio Service

With GPRS the  tracker is connected to a web server all the time and positions are sent at pre-set intervals. Each position is aprox  36 bytes only, but a 'header' must be also sent, which doubles the size of data being transmitted. Even though some operators charge for the header, the size of data sent is still very small. The internal algorithm makes sure that data is sent only when your vehicle moves at a set time interval - with default settings travelling 1,000 miles per month you can expect to transmit approximately 1MB of data. Cost per MB varies from operator to operator, On orange it cost aprox £4 per MB on PAYG cards. If you are using a PAYG SIM card, you will need to make sure that it is charged, otherwise the unit will not be able to transmit. It will, however, store positions in the internal memory  and will transmit them as soon as you add credit.