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Are there cheaply available short life GPS transmitters?
In many countries Tracked Delivery Services are too expensive for it to be realistic to pay for them on all items. If I could cheaply get (say) coin sized transmitters for a few dollars each, each trackable from my PC with enough charge in them to last 20 days or so then I could secure a lot more of my shipping and still save.
Any suggestions? I'd need something small enough to conceal in the packaging perhaps activated by removing a label? Better still if it immediately told me where it was on a google map and/or with a zipcode and map reference.,
1 Answer
- AndrewLv 69 years agoFavourite answer
GPS transmitters cost a few hundred million dollars. They are satellites.
The GPS systems you see are receive only, they are the only thing that knows their own location.
So you would need a GPS receiver and then some other radio transmitter (normally a cell phone modem) to transmit that information to the outside world.
At that point your far too large, high power and expensive for a throw away part.
You can put that sort of system on the delivery truck and then a throw away RFID tag on the package. That way you can't tell where the package is directly but you can tell when it enters and leaves the truck and where the truck is at the time.
That sort of system would be about $1000 per truck / doorway that you wanted to detect a packages entry/exit and around 20 cents per package.
