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by climb_stealth 1205 days ago
Which anti theft tracker did you go with? Is it a standalone unit with big battery? Just asking because you mention it.

Everyone is reselling the more or less same cheap Chinese units at insane markups. Firmware seems to be mostly identical. The tracking portals never have HTTPS. I haven't been able to find anything decent so far.
1 comments
Psychlist 1205 days ago
Sorry, I can't remember, this was several years ago and I've since sold the truck. But loosely my requirements were 24V input to match the truck, battery life of at least a week, external antenna and ability to work without user input. I just played on ebay until I found one that looked likely, searched for support forums and found a discussion on a European trucking forum where they liked it. It was under $US100.

Access to it was either via the manufacturer website or you could configure your own server IP and it would send JSON packets via HTTP post. No verification of the server, but it was also annoying enough to configure that I thought even a thief that found it would just smash it rather than fscking with it. AFAIK no-one ever did, it only stopped working when I stopped paying for the eSIM (the new owner never took over that tracker even though I told them all about it)

The immobiliser was a whole other ball of shit. It had a keyfob, but also remote monitoring via a physical SIM. I couldn't find a DIY-able one, so I was paying ~$US50/year to some Chinese company to monitor the system and allow me to track and immobilise it via their app. That worked, as did the geographic restrictions, but it was also easy enough to remove/bypass - the new owner hated the system and rang me to yell about it before removing it. I assume they just added a bypass wire and moved on.

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climb_stealth 1205 days ago
Ha, no worries! Thanks for responding though. All this stuff is super frustrating to deal with. I see regular posts on forums about people having to deal with old shitty immobiliser installs that have turned bad.

My thinking is that GPS tracking at least gives a chance of finding the car again if it gets stolen.

Being able to configure a server is already great. Will do some more digging.

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