BroadBand
Since late 60's
Just something I was thinking:
First pick up a GPS tracker on eBay.
There are only 6,700 to choose from, any where from 8 or 9 bucks up.
This one is $13. What gets a few more bucks is purchasing a sim card.
The following is a blatant copy paste of what another rider did.
It requires a GSM sim card (the cell phone type) to operate. But I'm not going to make any calls with it or need data, it just sends text messages.. SMS.
So the trick is to find a SIM card that won't cost me $30 or $40 a month.
I think I found my best solution. There's a company called ALARM SIM and it works out very cheap in the long run.
You pay $29 upfront one-time fee to buy the SIM card, then add $25 or $50 or whatever amount of airtime to it. It's intended to be used for an alarm or a GPS tracker that sends out an SMS message, not so much for phones really.
T-MO messages use your airtime at a rate of 15 cents for each message while AT&T messages cost 30 cents each, and you have to decide which one you want to go with when you purchase the SIM.
AT&T has a much higher nation wide saturation area, so I'm going to go with that, since it's a GPS tracker on my motorcycle and could be riding anywhere.
There is a nominal account charge (30 cents a month, federal thing I believe) but beyond that, your $25 or $50 of airtime is only used up by how many messages your SIM sends out. No charge for incoming messages to ping the GPS tracker. So $25 with AT&T would be 83 messages.. minus 30 cents a month to keep your account open with them.
That seems loads better than $30 a month, every month, for something you're hopefully not going to use much.
The next trick will be to place this device on the bike in a place where I'm not masking the GPS signal (I think that part will be okay), and connect power to it without being obvious about where it is. I've heard that thieves immediately look in the tail section, and then inside the fairings, so I'll have to get creative, and hide the power wires so it looks like part of the normal wiring harness.
First pick up a GPS tracker on eBay.
There are only 6,700 to choose from, any where from 8 or 9 bucks up.
This one is $13. What gets a few more bucks is purchasing a sim card.
The following is a blatant copy paste of what another rider did.
It requires a GSM sim card (the cell phone type) to operate. But I'm not going to make any calls with it or need data, it just sends text messages.. SMS.
So the trick is to find a SIM card that won't cost me $30 or $40 a month.
I think I found my best solution. There's a company called ALARM SIM and it works out very cheap in the long run.
You pay $29 upfront one-time fee to buy the SIM card, then add $25 or $50 or whatever amount of airtime to it. It's intended to be used for an alarm or a GPS tracker that sends out an SMS message, not so much for phones really.
T-MO messages use your airtime at a rate of 15 cents for each message while AT&T messages cost 30 cents each, and you have to decide which one you want to go with when you purchase the SIM.
AT&T has a much higher nation wide saturation area, so I'm going to go with that, since it's a GPS tracker on my motorcycle and could be riding anywhere.
There is a nominal account charge (30 cents a month, federal thing I believe) but beyond that, your $25 or $50 of airtime is only used up by how many messages your SIM sends out. No charge for incoming messages to ping the GPS tracker. So $25 with AT&T would be 83 messages.. minus 30 cents a month to keep your account open with them.
That seems loads better than $30 a month, every month, for something you're hopefully not going to use much.
The next trick will be to place this device on the bike in a place where I'm not masking the GPS signal (I think that part will be okay), and connect power to it without being obvious about where it is. I've heard that thieves immediately look in the tail section, and then inside the fairings, so I'll have to get creative, and hide the power wires so it looks like part of the normal wiring harness.
