Throughout time, especially in recent years, technology has given us a lot of innovations and conveniences that have made our lives easier and much more efficient. Traveling to places thousands of miles away in the matter of a few hours is now possible with the help of cars, boats, planes, and other forms of transportation. Getting in touch with our loved ones, even those who are far from us, is faster and easier. It need not be said that we are living much more convenient lives now thanks to technology. One of the major technological advances that we have started to enjoy are GPS trackers.
Tracking devices do just what their name entails: track and monitor locations. But the specific uses to which they can be applied are certainly varied. For one thing, they can be used to track down vehicles of all sorts of sizes and for all purposes, from cars to boats and even planes.
But It Was Right Here?! Extremely Large Vehicles Stolen and Never Recovered
Every new car owner has undoubtedly spent some time worrying about it falling into the hands of car thieves. Let’s face it: the newer and nicer your car, the more attractive it is for a crook, and vehicle theft occurs in the United States every 44 seconds. However, it is not just your average sized automobile that falls into this category of missing vehicles. Thieves can make off with any type of vehicle and surprisingly enough, size is not always a limiting factor.
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Missing Vehicles: Tanks for Nothing
If you follow international news or have seen the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips, you are familiar with Somali pirates and their infamous practice of hijacking ships. One of the most notorious cases involved an oil tanker called the MV Asterious, which disappeared in 2008 while moored at Ghana.
Boats of this size are gigantic and can carry millions of barrels of oil resulting in cargo worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They would seem to be impossible to hide, but these pirates managed it: the fully loaded MV Asterious is still missing almost a decade later.
If that were not enough, two more tankers also disappeared that year, but one did turn up later sporting a brand-new paint job! The Nigerian Navy was supposed to be watching over these vessels and one can only imagine the reports they sent to the companies that owned the ships. Needless to say, there have been accusations that the Navy colluded with the pirates.
A Plane Case of Theft
There have been many cases of planes disappearing while in flight or falling victim to hijackers. In 2003, a different kind of airplane disappearance occurred. In May 2003, one or more thieves made off with a Boeing 727-223 from Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, Luanda, Angola. The incident was widely publicized and the search for the missing aircraft involved a number of different countries and law enforcement agencies, including the CIA and the FBI.
Despite all of this law-enforcement know, no concrete evidence of the plane’s whereabouts ever surfaced. Owned by a financially troubled Angola airline, the aircraft had been sitting idle for 14 months when two men boarded it and took off without permission. The plane’s last known heading was Southwest over the Atlantic Ocean. Theft for the purposes of collecting insurance was one of the motives suggested by authorities, but we will likely never know the true reason behind the disappearance.
Whether your vehicle is the size of an oil tanker or just a handy little Smart Car, you do not want to deal with the hassle and stress that come from having it part of the missing vehicles list of the authorities. GPS technology cannot only help you get where you have to go, but it can also protect your property. By including a GPS tracker inside your vehicle, you can easily, and very economically, monitor its whereabouts at all times.
If a thief should strike, this tiny electronic security guard allows you to give the police a heads up, making successful recovery more likely. Act now and let a GPS tracker help you get a peaceful night’s rest without any worry that your favorite vehicle is in danger of disappearing forever.
The Other Uses for GPS Trackers
Besides tracking missing cars and extremely large vehicles like boats, yachts, and planes, GPS trackers can prove useful in tracking much smaller but not less valuable objects and people.
- They can track down missing luggage.
Imagine yourself at the airport and you’re at the baggage claim area waiting for your checked in luggage to come around on the conveyor belt. You wait several minutes when the thought suddenly occurs to you: your bags are nowhere to be found. It turns out that there was a mix-up at the baggage handling section of the area and your bags were shipped off to a different destination. This would be a huge problem especially if you were traveling under time constraints. But if you’ve invested in a GPS tracker, it would simply be a matter of logging on to the tracker’s database via your phone’s app and you will instantly have an idea about the exact location of your bags. This enables you to recover your possessions quickly or at least have an exact idea where they are so you don’t have to waste precious time waiting on the airline to track your stuff.
- They can track your valuables such as your jewelry, important documents, gadgets, and even musical instruments.
We all have possessions that are valuable to us that we might not be able to keep an eye on all the time. Such items are often at risk of being stolen, due to their often high value. And there might be cases when we misplace or lose them, despite our best efforts to take care of them. GPS trackers are useful devices that can help us track down these valuable items in instances when they get stolen or misplaced.
- They can even track our pets and loved ones.
Vehicles and valuable objects are not the only things that GPS devices can track. They are also able to track the whereabouts of our loved ones and monitor their well-being. In fact, one of the common uses of trackers is to look after young children and elderly relatives or patients. Children and senior citizens are the ones who are most likely to wander off, get lost, or go missing, so tracking devices can help in ensuring their safety and security. Some devices even have features that allow people to monitor the activities and health status of their wearers, which can ben helpful if the wearer is elderly and has falled down and needs immediate medical help. They also have SOS buttons which can enable the wearer to send out an instant call for help if ever he gets into a critical or dangerous situation.
- They can trace down missing drones.
Locating lost drones is another purpose that GPS trackers have. Like tracking devices, drones are a recent technological innovation. They were first used in the army to perform surveillance and other similar military procedures. However, through the years, their usage has also expanded to other fields. For instance, drones are widely used in film and TV production nowadays to produce better and high-definition landscape shots. They are also used in the agriculture, real estate, and manufacturing industries. Their appeal has even spread to travel vloggers and hobbyists, who find these devices useful in capturing footage of the landscapes of the places they travel to. As such, because of their usefulness, drones are considered as valuable gadgets. But they are also prone to loss because they can suffer from misdirected signals and fly out of sight. GPS trackers make it possible to track and recover drones in the event that they do lose direction or even get stolen by somebody else.
- They can be helpful for law enforcement.
Aside from the military, another agency of the government that gets an advantage from GPS trackers is the police force. Tracking devices can be helpful to police officers and investigators when they are trying to catch suspects under surveillance. They can simply attach a small and lightweight Trackimo tracker to the vehicle of the suspect so they can follow and investigate his actions and whereabouts. Trackers can help them gather crucial pieces of evidence against the suspect.
- They can be useful for mapping and surveying.
Real estate and construction are other areas by which GPS trackers can prove to be useful. During mapping and surveying projects, GPS can help in determining locations and mapping out certain geographical positions and in much faster time compared to previous non-automatic methods. GPS can provide a lot of benefits when it comes to mapping out highways, rivers, power lines, land plots, soil types, crops, and the like.
- They can add security when traveling solo to remote places.
Traveling to remote places on your own brings with it a kind of thrill that you won’t get anywhere else. However, as you will be traveling to unfamiliar places, it’s important that you provide yourself with a means of protection. A GPS tracker can help ease the minds of your loved ones back home as it enables them to monitor your whereabouts at any time and no matter where you are in the world. You can also send out SOS calls via an SOS button feature.
With all these advantages that it offers, a GPS tracker can help to make people’s lives easier and more secure. As the leading maker of tracking devices in the market, Trackimo’s aim is to help people in many aspects of their lives.
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