Reader Bob was kind enough to send me a question recently asking my thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of hand held tracking devices (typically a service from your cell phone carrier added on your phone bill) versus the traditional vehicle tracking method of truck-mounted professional-grade tracking with with fixed,high performance antennas. I appreciate the question and I’m always up for more … you can leave a comment or use my secure,spam-free contact form to get my attention. Here’s my answer to Bob:
Hi Bob,
Thanks for writing and for a worthwhile question. I should be writing more on this subject,especially since cell phone solutions have now become so much more common. To give you a brief answer on this,I’m assuming the fixed installation you are asking about is also a cellular-based system …in other words,although it’s vehicle mounted,it reports the vehicle location via the cellular network to a computer in your office,the same as a carrier-provided cell phone tracking service would …apples to apples comparison.
Second ‘preamble’is,if you are in business as I assume you are,my own advice id,do not use a covert installation. bringing employees into the picture at an early stage of the program is vital,based on my experience. especially in today’s doom and gloom business climate any employee with two brain cells to rub together ought to be able to understand why management must plug the leaks to keep the sinking ship afloat. When asked to help,especially at the planning stages,employees typically ‘climb aboard’,even if initially they are wary of or even hostile to tracking. better a monitored job than no job.
OK,that out of your way,you already mentioned two of the biggest negatives to the consumer-grade cell phone tracking solution.
The Tech Turns the Phone Off: Not only might a recalcitrant worker turn the phone or the phone’s tracking feature off intentionally as an act of defiance …by far the most ’searched for’question on this blog is ‘how to defeat GPS tracking …but many of these systems are built so that GPS tracking stops when a call is received …some even require the phone user to restart the tracking application manually after each call …even the most dedicated GPS supporter is going to go untracked many times with this scenario …to be of any real use the system needs to track every time all the time,not just when someone remembers it.
You are Tracking the Phone and Not the Tech: In most cases this is _not_ what the business owner wants. You want to know where you vehicles are in a majority of business cases. The possibilities for fraud here are just enormous …a famous one I remember a few winters ago was a snow plow contractor ripping off the state of Massachusetts by carrying two a hand-held GPS phone trackers in the cabs of several of his snow plows. It looked on the screen like two plows were working in tandem and the state got the bill as if the unscrupulous vendor was actually supplying the service that he claimed to.
A couple other issues that play in this decision:
Loss or Theft: It’s a fact of life that people are going to lose items that aren’t mounted to something. If the device is something they didn’t particularly want to have with them in the first place their forgetfulness is liable to reach epic proportions. Third parties are also very much more tempted by items like cell phones than they would be by some other non-consumer style piece of technical equipment…so you will lose phone,have phones break,have battery failures and so on to a degree which may well surprise you,and will certainly limit your business advantage. Truck mounted units don’t get lost,don’t go dead mysteriously and seldom get targeted by common thieves as a cell phone would.
Accuracy: Mainly because the phone is portable the employee is going to carry it in all sorts of ways …on a belt,in a shirt pocket,in a tool box,etc. Thus the phone’s antenna is going to be constantly in a different orientation and it will continually be working its little heart out trying to get an accurate ‘fix’from the GPS satellites. The results of tracking with a handheld device of a few days of weeks may absolutely amaze you. they will almost assuredly not delight you. In a typical hand-held phone service you’ll be lucky to consistently know what block your employee is on,let alone what address she is working at. Because the phone by necessity has to use the cheapest,smallest antenna and GPS processing chip it is also limited in resolution from the beginning when compared with decent permanent mount unit.
My advice? Cell phone trackers,“Track-Sticks”and other unmounted devices? Toy-like performance in many cases. OK for some segments of the market where mounting is not feasible but in general,a decent,vehicle-mount system will out perform the hand held in every business-related way.
Happy GPS Tracking
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