Let’s say you need to keep track of someone urgently, because they owe you an ice cream or something. You could hire a private detective, or don your very own grubby raincoat and hang about at a nearby street corner. Or you could take advantage of the plummeting price of sleazy spy-ware and go buy a GPS tracker like this.
The LAS 1505 GPS Tracker clamps onto any metal surface which can hold a magnet (like the underside of a car), and then logs any movements down to a 2.5 meter accuracy. The device does a continual second by second log, which then has to be downloaded to a PC via a USB port. So you’ve got to physically retrieve the unit after a tracking session in order to connect it up to your laptop or desktop PC. Good luck with that.
The thing runs on two AAA batteries which seem to be good for at least a few days, possibly up to a couple of weeks, according to reports. And when you’ve pulled the data off the device, you can view it on top of Google Earth to see exactly how the journey progressed. It will log the route traveled, the speed, duration of stops and more. Priced at $139.00.
Nefarious intentions aside, I like using a GPS tracker. Have had one since June 2009 to record our cycling trips and geo-tag photographs taken with a camera that doesn’t have its own GPS chip. It saves draining the mobile phone’s battery.
Also nice (for the scrap book) to see how high/fast my plane flew, which route it took and how many times we went round in the holding pattern before being allowed to land.
US$139 doesn’t seem exorbitant but I prefer rechargeable devices.