June 10, 20241 yr Signal the entire UK ulilising helium balloons? Pretty close to that. Way back in time, early 2015, I launched one of those low cost 36" foil party balloons filled with helium. It had a LoRa GPS tracker on it. If you fill the foil party balloons just right they will rise to circa 10km altitude and then float along at that altitude. Mine went from S.Wales over the Isle of Wight and then over France and the Med. I had had two way LoRa comms to the balloon, and could send and receive commands at up to 240km. So if it had been set up to act as a relay for ground based trackers it would have had a ground view of circa 500km diameter. However at the time there were only two LoRa trackers known to exist, both of them in the S.Wales area.
June 10, 20241 yr Pretty close to that. Way back in time, early 2015, I launched one of those low cost 36" foil party balloons filled with helium. It had a LoRa GPS tracker on it. [ATTACH=full]58096[/ATTACH] If you fill the foil party balloons just right they will rise to circa 10km altitude and then float along at that altitude. Mine went from S.Wales over the Isle of Wight and then over France and the Med. I had had two way LoRa comms to the balloon, and could send and receive commands at up to 240km. So if it had been set up to act as a relay for ground based trackers it would have had a ground view of circa 500km diameter. However at the time there were only two LoRa trackers known to exist, both of them in the S.Wales area. I don't know if you are aware of the tiny (1.8gm) programmable, balloon transmitters made by Hans Summers and sold for about £50. They have gps onboard, transmit their position, altitude, battery voltage and the temperature, using the weak signal protocol WSPR on a variety of frequencies, and are used by a community of radio amateurs and tracked around the world. Some have made many complete circuits of the planet. Summers who runs a business called QRP Labs, also runs a tracking page which shows where the balloons are. I have been amazed at how durable some of these tiny balloons are and have followed some for weeks. I have built many QRP Labs transmitters and transceivers over the years the business has operated and they are far and away the best producer of such kits we have ever had. https://qrp-labs.com/u4b Balloon transmitter https://shop.qrp-labs.com/ Other products Video in which Hans Summers discusses the ten year development of his balloon tracker which is now 33 mm x 12 mm and weighs 1.8gms
June 10, 20241 yr I don't know if you are aware of the tiny (1.8gm) programmable, balloon transmitters made by Hans Summers and sold for about £50. I have kept an eye on the WSPR stuff, although tecnically not legal for UK Amateurs. I was in circa 2012+ following what was happening with the UKHAS (UK High Altitude Society), they were using low tech comms for long distance tracking, which interested me. The UKHAS guys invited me up to give a talk on an Earth orbiting satellite project I had done using much the same comms they were using for their high altitude balloons. I was sat in the lecture theatre by a guy (Leo Bodnar) who announced that after many tries (64) one of his balloons had just completed the first circumnavigation of the World by a Pico.
June 10, 20241 yr Height is king for most UHF comms, you can increase the detection range of a tracker by maybe 100 times or more, if you can get high enough. Carrying a plane like I used above is not so practical, but there are these days hand size drones that weigh under 250g. Do satellite operators offer LoRa relay services? If so, how much do they charge per megabyte? Real time GPS bike tracking will require more data relayed, but a short message sent only after a bike is stolen would be cheaper. 77,000 "HELP! I'VE BEEN NICKED!" followed by GPS co-ordinates sent every year isn't going to amount to much data. They're not all going to be stolen at exactly the same time.
June 10, 20241 yr I have kept an eye on the WSPR stuff, although tecnically not legal for UK Amateurs. I was in circa 2012+ following what was happening with the UKHAS (UK High Altitude Society), they were using low tech comms for long distance tracking, which interested me. The UKHAS guys invited me up to give a talk on an Earth orbiting satellite project I had done using much the same comms they were using for their high altitude balloons. I was sat in the lecture theatre by a guy (Leo Bodnar) who announced that after many tries (64) one of his balloons had just completed the first circumnavigation of the World by a Pico. I have been running a WSPR beacon 24/7 since about 2012. An OFCOM guy came to follow up a spurious interference complaint from a crazy neighbour in about 2013. The neighbour - a nutter - thought that I was responsible for every failure of cheap electronic tat in his house because I had some antennas in my garden for ultra low power communications which were mostly receive anyway. The OFCOM guy phoned me to chat and suggested WSPR and QRP modes. He came to visit and I showed him my 100 miliwatt beacon and he said if more people with transmitting licences used WSPR, he would have fewer visits to do. Obviously the complaint was rejected and the loony neighbour was charged for the investigation. Since I am entitled by my license to put out 400 watt transmissions, a few milliwatts of weak signal protocol is neither here nor there. The nutter thought his crap TV system was my fault and not his bargain basement ridiculous home done installation. He also claimed I had affected his microwave oven. Crazy fecker.
June 10, 20241 yr Pretty close to that. Way back in time, early 2015, I launched one of those low cost 36" foil party balloons filled with helium. It had a LoRa GPS tracker on it. [ATTACH=full]58096[/ATTACH] If you fill the foil party balloons just right they will rise to circa 10km altitude and then float along at that altitude. Mine went from S.Wales over the Isle of Wight and then over France and the Med. I had had two way LoRa comms to the balloon, and could send and receive commands at up to 240km. So if it had been set up to act as a relay for ground based trackers it would have had a ground view of circa 500km diameter. However at the time there were only two LoRa trackers known to exist, both of them in the S.Wales area. Whoops i was talking about chasing one of these : a lot easier to see from 5 miles away still could be tricky to track down..
June 10, 20241 yr I was sat in the lecture theatre by a guy (Leo Bodnar) who announced that after many tries (64) one of his balloons had just completed the first circumnavigation of the World by a Pico. It is incredible what some of the more practised balloon folk can achieve. Dave VE3CKL has had balloons which continued multiple, and I mean many circumnavigations and stayed up over six months, continually transmitting on a twenty minute schedule in daylight with about 15 milliwatts of WSPR protocol, giving first the normal WSPR data (callsign, rough position, power) and then subsequently on the next cycle the special telemetry with more accurate position, altitude, temperature and battery voltage. Of course the batteries are tiny and very soon go dead after dark. They stay that way until the sun is on the tiny, light weight solar panels and then the QRP Labs beacon wakes up, takes its GPS fix and starts transmitting again. I regard Hans Summers as an absolute genius. I have been dealing with him since he was operating out of a tiny cupboard in his flat in Japan when he was doing comms for a big bank there. He designed all of his kits himself and made them available pretty much at cost and he supported numpties like me to get them working. I can't imagine how he does it for the money he charges, but now he is selling so many that he is making a decent living. He now lives in Turkey by the sea and runs his operation from there. His kits are visionary in their capabilities and of course they all depend on his pretty special programming skills to do what they do in the various micro controllers he has used over the years. The difference between Summers' kits and most amateur radio kits is night and day. I started out in the early eighties building comparatively terrible kits which could not even hold a frequency long enough to do a morse code contact without drifting a couple of kilohertz. The current qrp labs stuff doesn't even deviate 1 htz over a two minute transmission. It is a thousand times better than what went before. My beacons when running about two watts are received and decoded in Australia any time I want to switch them on pretty much. There are some EXTREMELY clever and visonary people behind all this. People like Hans who design kits and people like Loe Taylor who invented the weak signal comms protocols which allow tiny signals about the same power as your mobile phone to get from my back garden to the exact opposite side of the planet in New Zealand and be received by a simple receiver and decoded by a computer from well below the receiver noise level. Joe Taylor of course is a world renowned astro-physicist who has had the Nobel Prise for his work on Binary Pulsars and Gravitational Radiation. In his retirement he invented a whole pile of weak signal communications protocols and the software to decode them. https://qrp-labs.com/circumnavigators.html#b64 https://qrp-labs.com/u4b
June 11, 20241 yr Do satellite operators offer LoRa relay services? One guy, who I have met several times, runs Lacuna Space. https://lacuna.space/ They have satellites in orbit collecting data from LoRa sensors in remote locations and relaying it back down to Earth.
June 11, 20241 yr One guy, who I have met several times, runs Lacuna Space. https://lacuna.space/ They have satellites in orbit collecting data from LoRa sensors in remote locations and relaying it back down to Earth. Does he currently own a nice bicycle? Could perhaps be persuaded to move a satellite a bit for a test, if he's got skin in the game... https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/lacuna-constellation#m6p-multipurpose-6u-platform Edited June 11, 20241 yr by guerney
June 16, 20241 yr When O2 kill GSM killing my GPS tracker light, if my bike gets stolen, I could send a text to one of these 4G switches, or something similar... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Channel-Wireless-Controller-Failure-Command/dp/B08KVTNBK8 ...to turn on power to the 4G tracker the OP linked... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/235543537853 ...thus there will be a small pay-as-you-go connection fee for the tracker to send it's GPS coordinates via an internet connection, instead of monthly. Both pay-as-you-go phone numbers would have to be kept alive by calling/texting them every few months (<180 days), but the overall average cost of post-theft tracking over a number of years, will be lower than £96 per year if using the 4g tracker only. £79.75 4G switch + £11.86 4G tracker + (£10 PAYG top-up X 2) = £111.71. Then about a tenner a year for calls and texts to those two PAYG numbers. Clunky, slightly overweight and cheap, like me. Edited June 16, 20241 yr by guerney
June 16, 20241 yr As we know Air Tags are iOS/iPhone specific but Android are fighting back - go into youtube and search 'Chipolo and Pebblebee ' or similar to get an insight into this interesting alternative which will work with the Android Find My Device network. (ok, so you don't use an Android smartphone! - in that case you'll have to get your oil lamp out and search that way ). As has been said, a lot of existing trackers will stop working when the 4 cellular providers turn off their 3G networks most if not all be the end of 2024. If you do manage to locate your stolen bike, unless you're prepared to take your own action for recovery, it'll still be 'good by bike' as there is unlikely to be any police action to aid recovery (but likely plenty of action if you take matters into your own hands). This recent article here in the Sunday Times illustrates this in relation to iPhone thefts: Edited June 16, 20241 yr by Bikes4two
June 16, 20241 yr As has been said, a lot of existing trackers will stop working when the 4 cellular providers turn off their 3G networks most if not all be the end of 2024. O2 supply ends at some point in 2025. Chipolo and Pebblebee Unlike Airtags, Chipolo doesn't have UWB. I don't know if Pebblebee does... "We’ve confirmed with Chipolo that their trackers are Bluetooth-only and do not come with UWB tech so far, and we’re waiting to hear back from Pebblebee." https://www.androidauthority.com/google-find-my-device-network-3432217/ ...but even if they did, anyone with an Android phone will be able to detect the presence of either, as Apple fondleslabs can with Airtags. The 4G switch could also activate something LSD spray to rapidly incapacitate his entire household, making retrieval easier - he'll be telling his thieving scum mates about how a giant tentacled 22 legged alien victoria sponge with big ears abducted the bike, one dark orange raining meringues. Or perhaps in all the confusion, the bike could topple itself over onto four steerable wheels situated on one side, to launch itself through a window and self-drive it's way home. Edited June 17, 20241 yr by guerney
June 17, 20241 yr As we know Air Tags are iOS/iPhone specific but Android are fighting back - go into youtube and search 'Chipolo and Pebblebee ' or similar to get an insight into this interesting alternative which will work with the Android Find My Device network. (ok, so you don't use an Android smartphone! - in that case you'll have to get your oil lamp out and search that way ). As has been said, a lot of existing trackers will stop working when the 4 cellular providers turn off their 3G networks most if not all be the end of 2024. If you do manage to locate your stolen bike, unless you're prepared to take your own action for recovery, it'll still be 'good by bike' as there is unlikely to be any police action to aid recovery (but likely plenty of action if you take matters into your own hands). This recent article here in the Sunday Times illustrates this in relation to iPhone thefts: [ATTACH=full]58233[/ATTACH] If those low bandwidth modes are turned off. I think the smart meter system in the southern half of the uk will be in trouble. I think all smart meters south of yorkshire depend on data sent over those cellular networks on 2g, i think. The far north is covered by a 430 mhz radio system run by Arquiva. I'm on that.
June 18, 20241 yr Whoops i was talking about chasing one of these : a lot easier to see from 5 miles away still could be tricky to track down.. Surprising how visually one can lose sight of these once line of sight is lost or are tree top hugging. Still have my lighter then air with basket stored in my garage , hasn't seen light of day for 24 years.
December 30, 20241 yr Building Your First LoRa Mesh Network From Scratch https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-building-your-first-lora-mesh-network-from-scratch
January 27, 20251 yr I use one of these hidden under the bench seat, battery life is great, works in 4g. Cost under a fiver a month and you get alerted on your phone if the bike is tampered with as it has a vibration sensor inside. Brilliant bit of kit, sadly Vodafone abandoned customers of their bike tracker which cost around the same amount per month, this is a worthy replacement. https://amzn.eu/d/iUjxGNW
January 27, 20251 yr I use one of these hidden under the bench seat, battery life is great, works in 4g. Cost under a fiver a month and you get alerted on your phone if the bike is tampered with as it has a vibration sensor inside. Brilliant bit of kit, sadly Vodafone abandoned customers of their bike tracker which cost around the same amount per month, this is a worthy replacement. https://amzn.eu/d/iUjxGNW That's from the same company which made/rebadged my GPS tracker light, but 4G and no light. About time they went 4G with products, and thanks for pointing this out because my tracker light will eventually have it's network connetion sacrificed to make room for 6/7/85345G or whatever. Looking at the manual... (PDF compressed into a .RAR file) https://www.tkstargps.com/index.php?m=Download&a=down&id=30 ... yours works the same way as mine, therefore it should be possible to disable the APN, if you want to avoid monthly internet fees and communicate with it more cheapy using SMS messages exclusively, as I do with my WINNES tracker light. After disabling the APN, you'd lose real-time tracking via the app and website, but still would receive it's location after sending a SMS, or if you have enabled shock detection. Works out ultra cheap if using just SMS, only the cost of SMS messages and the minimum top-up necessary to keep the Giffgaff PAYG phone number alive. Minimum top-up is £10, and I haven't topped up for well over a year - I think provided you send it a text every 179 days or fewer, the telephone number remains yours. Edited January 27, 20251 yr by guerney
January 27, 20251 yr I've noticed they also do a larger waterproof version with magnet and higher capacity "9000mAh" battery... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C813977J ...which according to the manual, can also work very inexpensively using SMSs only, like my GPS tracker light.... https://www.tkstargps.com/Download/4gtk905amp4gtk905busermanual.html ...so can this smaller one with magnet... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D1VH2Y4D ...as can this smallest: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CLP5M4RZ Manuals: https://www.tkstargps.com/Download/UserManual/ Thieves can scan for an AirTag using an iDevice, almost none will be able to scan for this type of GPS tracker. If someone tries to sell you a bike covered in foil... Edited January 28, 20251 yr by guerney
January 30, 20251 yr That's from the same company which made/rebadged my GPS tracker light, but 4G and no light. About time they went 4G with products, and thanks for pointing this out because my tracker light will eventually have it's network connetion sacrificed to make room for 6/7/85345G or whatever. Looking at the manual... (PDF compressed into a .RAR file) https://www.tkstargps.com/index.php?m=Download&a=down&id=30 ... yours works the same way as mine, therefore it should be possible to disable the APN, if you want to avoid monthly internet fees and communicate with it more cheapy using SMS messages exclusively, as I do with my WINNES tracker light. After disabling the APN, you'd lose real-time tracking via the app and website, but still would receive it's location after sending a SMS, or if you have enabled shock detection. Works out ultra cheap if using just SMS, only the cost of SMS messages and the minimum top-up necessary to keep the Giffgaff PAYG phone number alive. Minimum top-up is £10, and I haven't topped up for well over a year - I think provided you send it a text every 179 days or fewer, the telephone number remains yours. You can use your own SIM in the one I linked to. But just used the one provided and am quite happy to pay the sub.
January 30, 20251 yr I've noticed they also do a larger waterproof version with magnet and higher capacity "9000mAh" battery... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C813977J ...which according to the manual, can also work very inexpensively using SMSs only, like my GPS tracker light.... https://www.tkstargps.com/Download/4gtk905amp4gtk905busermanual.html ...so can this smaller one with magnet... https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D1VH2Y4D ...as can this smallest: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CLP5M4RZ Manuals: https://www.tkstargps.com/Download/UserManual/ Thieves can scan for an AirTag using an iDevice, almost none will be able to scan for this type of GPS tracker. If someone tries to sell you a bike covered in foil... There's a magnet on my one, but the bike is aluminium so I used velcro stickers
February 1, 20251 yr There's a magnet on my one, but the bike is aluminium so I used velcro stickers Maybe I can hide one of the tiny GPS trackers inside my handlebar? Independently powered with cheap and nasty Chinese 18650s, so that when they explode the GPS unit is propelled like a bullet into whatever car happens to be alongside at the time. I could bodge a waterproof USB charging port into a handlebar-end perhaps, along with exit for the wires for the GPS antenna? Wouldn't get much of a signal inside the handlebar I expect.
February 1, 20251 yr Maybe I can hide one of the tiny GPS trackers inside my handlebar? Independently powered with cheap and nasty Chinese 18650s, so that when they explode the GPS unit is propelled like a bullet into whatever car happens to be alongside at the time. I could bodge a waterproof USB charging port into a handlebar-end perhaps, along with exit for the wires for the GPS antenna? Wouldn't get much of a signal inside the handlebar I expect. Perhaps the handlebars themselves can act as an antenna? Looks like the unit is glued sealed yet I’m sure with a bit of knife malarkey it can be persuaded to offer its insides to you great idea, the battery lasts a hell of a long time, so perhaps you could fit a usb port into a bar end?? For when it needs a charge.. well over a fortnight when it’s getting a good signal, I love it way more than the Vodafone dongle that it replaced.
February 1, 20251 yr Perhaps the handlebars themselves can act as an antenna? Looks like the unit is glued sealed yet I’m sure with a bit of knife malarkey it can be persuaded to offer its insides to you great idea, the battery lasts a hell of a long time, so perhaps you could fit a usb port into a bar end?? For when it needs a charge.. well over a fortnight when it’s getting a good signal, I love it way more than the Vodafone dongle that it replaced. Sorry for the grammar here, I had a night out with workmates last night and I might be suffering more than I thought today
February 1, 20251 yr Perhaps the handlebars themselves can act as an antenna? It'd be wonderful if that would work, but I doubt it - seems GPS antennas are constructed with fiendish cleverness by far eastern demonologists, plus there are A-GPS signals from cellphone towers to receive for faster position calculation. It might not even be possible for me to solder miniscule enough to attach antenna wires, and the extension GPS antenna would have to be compatible. A battery pack which powers the GPS tracker for months while my bike is being transported in a container by ship to Africa or wherever, would be nice. TBH my bike isn't worth the trouble. Edited February 1, 20251 yr by guerney
March 6, 20251 yr Man arrested after officers use trackers to find stolen e-bikes https://www.merseyside.police.uk/news/merseyside/news/2025/march-2025/man-arrested-after-officers-use-trackers-to-find-stolen-e-bikes/
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