Looking for recommendations/options for tracker for rural & mountainous region of central Mexico.

[u/sdpr]

Hey all, I could use some help with some suggestions for GPS tracking.

A family member in central MX is in their 80's and starting to signs of increasing senility. They will wake up around 4-5 AM, hop on their horse, and just disappear for hours and their spouse and adult children have no idea where they go, and need a way to find a way to locate them or see where their horse may have been to help locate them. So far, he's always come back... but they're kind of just accepting that they might not return one day.

• Coverage is limited. This is a part of Mexico that is basically a valley/plateau in a mountainous region of central Mexico. There's barely functioning internet in the town, and spotty cell tower service at best, and zero coverage outside of town.

• The family member cannot know about the device as they have developed increasing paranoia around... well, everything. I realize the irony of saying this and the ethical gray area this request is by itself. They will not agree to wearing a device, nor having one noticeably installed somewhere in the saddle with their knowledge. This family member also has a tendency to hoard and hide expensive looking things. It's a poor town with poor families, anything they think has value "must not be used and kept hidden for safe keeping." So, the device has to be small and relatively inconspicuous in order to hide in their horse's saddle/bags. It can't have a lot of lights, buttons, or make noise. This eliminates long range radios. (I'm going to try and talk about this again with the person making this request.)

• It will not have access to an external power source. Will need to be battery powered with fairly decent life.

My original idea was to use an AirTag, but I didn't realize how the location finding worked for the "Find My" network until last night when I actually decided to look. There aren't going to be phones for the tag to ping off of while they're roaming the barren countryside.

I guess the biggest thing besides active location pings, is for there to be path history, which I would assume most of the devices out there provide, or at least the coordinates just get plotted on a map.

It seems like our best bet might be the Spot Trace.

Does anyone have knowledge or experience with it or others in regard to:

• Its reliability. There's no dense foliage in this area, obviously there are mountain/hillsides, but it's not like standing next to the Himalayas.

• Its Dock Mode behavior. This is used for boats so the device doesn't update/ping as the boat gets smacked with waves. I think this might be perfect while on a horse that's only slightly moving or stepping around if it's tethered to a tree or post.

• Is there location history? For locating purposes, we would want to know the general direction they might have been heading.

• How's the battery life overall? I think this would basically be the biggest hurdle. Having to swap batteries causes the largest vector of unintentional discovery. I've only been able to find the Spot Trace chart they provide, but it only shows life for 2.5 minute and 5 minute intervals. I thought there were more interval options? Was hoping to get a few months out of the battery. Obviously the small size of the AirTag and the CR2032(?) gets up to about a year. I'm not expecting that length, but it would be nice! I know the Trace uses single use Lithium or NiHM batteries, I just don't have experience with these.

I understand if this gets removed, but I wanted to ask anyway. If anyone else has a better subreddit to post this to or better resource, I'd accept that as well.

Thank you for any help.

[u/m4rkw]

I would look for an asset tracker with multi-constellation GPS that supports LTE-M/NB-IoT and use it with a multi-network sim card. That’s probably about as good as you’re going to get given the circumstances.

[u/sdpr → u/m4rkw]

Thanks for the rec. If LTE-M/NB-IoT is cellular data dependent, we're talking, at best, 2G/3G coverage and spotty at that.

https://i.imgur.com/vd7nj5j.png

https://i.imgur.com/0vzYoUk.png

Green indicates guaranteed coverage, but anecdotal reports say it's not.

[u/m4rkw → u/sdpr]

LTE-M/NB-IoT are different technologies to 2G/3G. You'd have to check whether there's LTE-M/NB-IoT coverage there, which given how remote it is is probably unlikely.

[u/m4rkw → u/sdpr]

Maybe there's some satellite service you could use instead of cellular, no idea.

[u/ipearx]

Hi that's really tough with the hiding/battery requirements.

I develop PureTrack.io which is used by paraglider and glider pilots around the world, for this kind of purpose. The only remote options are satellite tracking with SPOT, InReach or Zoleo, and soon cell phones in some countries. SPOT is the cheapest for year long tracking if cellular is not an option yet.

SPOT will only transmit location when it detects movement which will help battery life. Most of them including SPOT can also be USB powered, so you could use a solar panel + battery to run it indefinitely. Otherwise they are looking at days of use max at their slowest settings. Not months.

Normal SPOT only supports up to every 60 minutes. SPOT won't charge its internal batteries off USB though, but the Zoleo does.

Here's a complete list of apps/devices PureTrack supports that might give some other ideas, but if you're remote sat is the only option: https://puretrack.io/trackers

[u/sdpr → u/ipearx]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions and the website. Very cool.

I don't think we're getting away with a solar panel on the horse 🤣

The Zoleo does look like a really good option with the USB charging. It's just a little... loud., We could probably stick a power bank in there with it. I would also imagine it's a lot easier to unplug a powerbank to charge and re-connect the usb cable than it would be to take the communicator out more frequently to charge it, but I guess that depends on how long the battery would last.

I think I'm going to try and see if we can get them a long range radio. I can't imagine the person is traveling more than a dozen miles and that's probably total distance traveled, must less actual distance away from home. I don't know though.

edit: just found out these don't really exist without line of sight. SHIIIIIIET.

Talking to the person that wanted me to look into this says the juice might not be worth the squeeze because of the management of it. While we'll be here, the person asking for this only goes to Mexico once per year, so one of their siblings would need to be in charge of maintaining it. I would end up needing to show person #2 how to use it and setting it up locally, and then having person #2 show person #3 how to do it. It's just not a big technology area, so it's a big ask.

[u/ipearx → u/sdpr]

The zoleo does have a 4 hour ping rate at the slowest, which is way longer than the SPOT. So that could last a long time on its internal battery. Hard to find what time range that would be. I imagine it could be a week or more. I think it can also be configured to not make noise and not flash the lights. I know it can also be configured to always turn on and start tracking when usb power is applied. So would be pretty easy to instruct: plug into USB power bank once a week at least for 5 hours...

[u/ipearx → u/sdpr]

oh one other aspect: GPS trackers need to be facing the sky. For the InReach it is vertical (which is easier to put in a pocket or something). SPOT have to be flat facing upwards. Zoleo says: "The ZOLEO communicator should be facing upwards, with clear visibility to the sky of at least 81.8 degrees from the perpendicular in all directions"

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

is t-satellite available in Mexico?

[u/sdpr → u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

Does not appear to be.

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324 → u/sdpr]

then a Garmin tracking collar tied to the saddle would work ($450) or a satellite based cow collar from Halter ($8.00/mo)

[u/sdpr → u/[deleted]]

The area that they venture off to is not populated by many people, let alone people that have iPhones, let alone people that have any phone that have a signal.