Vehicle Tracking Equipment

Vehicle tracking equipment is essentially made up of a relatively small tracking device and a GPS & GPRS/GSM antenna, although many tracking devices may include these antennas within the unit itself. Additional equipment can be added to most tracking systems that can provide additional functionality and reporting.

A vehicle tracking device operates by continually receiving data from multiple GPS satellites that are orbiting the Earth. Tracking devices use these frequent transmissions to accurately calculate their global position as well as speed, direction of travel and even rate of acceleration & deceleration. This data that has been processed by the tracking device is then transmitted securely back to the tracking provider’s server over the mobile phone data network. This data is then processed and stored by the server which is when it becomes available to the customer and they are able to view their vehicles locations via an online tracking application. Whilst it may seem that there is a lot of time involved in this process, users of tracking systems can receive vehicle location updates as often as once every 60 seconds or faster.

Vehicle tracking equipment has significantly come down in price which is encouraging more businesses to install these systems into their vehicles as they can quite often provide a substantial return on investment.