This may not be the appropriate place to ask this, but you folks all seem to be pretty "hands on" when it comes to maintaining your 996s, so I'm giving it a shot.

I'm contemplating installing a GPS tracker on my 996 and wonder if any of you have experience doing the same. Since I have a 2003, I definitely want something that won't drain my battery

I've done some web searches and all I get is affiliate "review" sites that talk about how great x, y, and z are and give you affiliate links to them. I seen some that have absurd monthly cell fees and am not interested in those. I searched a bit on rennlist too but couldn't find anything that answered my questions.

I want:
* wired in "hidden" solution (not OBD)
* something that will alert me (to iPhone via notification or text) when the car moves and the ability to turn that off easily or maybe better to just turn it on when it gets to a given location.
* something that allows me to track car on iPhone
* reasonable monthly fee. definitely less than $20/month, not the $80 I saw on one

I think if 5G rolls out there may be better solutions, but it won't matter then because 5G is going to rot our brains and make us all kill each other (a la "Bird Box").

 

I received a gps key finder keyring for Christmas, was thinking about throwing it into my centre console.

Doesn't answer your question but thought I'd mention I'm thinking about gps tracking as well.
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LoJack is the way to go if you're serious about tracking and property recovery.

https://www.lojack.com

 

Seems that you can't self-install though. That's a deal-breaker for me. I'm very particular with who touches any of my cars. I've seen too much hack work out of car dealers.

Plus having someone else install it in your car means a bunch of people know it's there and where it is, which defeats the purpose.

 

Get a spare iPhone (iPhone SE) and hardwire a USB outlet wire into the trunk and hide it behind the "carpet" with the stereo wiring.
The charging phone doesn't take much power and even if the car's battery gets disconnected, the iPhone will still send it's location.
Use "Find my iPhone" to see where your iPhone & 996 is located.
Cellular Data rate can be shared with your carry iPhone.

 

I completely understand your concern, but the fact is you're more likely to have your car crushed by a falling meteorite than stolen by a LoJack installer. I've used both LoJack and simple iPhones (running the life360 app) to track my cars. As TexSquirrel suggests, find an old iPhone add a phone line to it, run a simple USB iphone cable to the phone. Hide it somewhere on the car and boom.... Your car is trackable.

 

I like the old iPhone idea--especially since I have one I would just need to add my extra SIM to my account.

I wasn't saying the LoJack installer would steal it--I'm guessing they wouldn't be a LoJack dealer for long. I was more worried about "random" person walking by. There are so many people running scams that I wouldn't put it past someone to figure out that selling this info is a good "business". Too many people in this country spend too much time trying to figure out how to rip off hard working people so they don't have to work hard.

 

Lots of options here. The spare iPhone method noted above will certainly work. The cheapest option is to buy a prepaid SIM card ($10 from Amazon) and insert it into one of the mini-GPS trackers . I haven't used that tracker specifically but they're all pretty similar. They can be set up to send you a text when the device leaves your "home zone", i.e. driveway.

 

Before you go to bed at night, do you peek into the garage to make sure your 996 is ok? Be honest.

 

Who doesn't?

My nightly routine:
Lock front door, peek at 996 when locking garage door, let dogs out, peek at 996 again, let dogs in, lock back door, turn off lights, peek at 996 once more, get in bed and dream of driving my 996.

 

Just wanted to add my 2 cents as a tech. There are numerous times a month we get cars in with dead batteries. We ALWAYS look for the hidden GPS units first. I would say 90% of the time parasitic draws are caused by these cheap pieces of crap - either hardwired or obd plug in's. Majority of the time its either a used car lot unit that the owner of the car was not even aware of or its the insurance company savings plug in's. We have several fleets that provide us with units to install, those seam to be high dollar units and we almost never have the problem with them. I would highly suggest staying away from the cheap crap and spend some money on something reputable.

 

 

I have LoJack on my VW and have never had a problem with the battery. I bought the car used and it had the device already installed. It cost me $200 to have the account transferred over to me but there are no ongoing fees. A rep had to come out to do whatever needed to be done at the car. You will likely get a break on your car insurance if you have one installed.

 

I have experience with gps devices and the parasitic load on your battery is the big issue. Any cheap device will work if battery drain wasn't the issue. I'd say LoJack is a good consumer option. If you know what the limitations are, it may help with your choice. GPS needs a good line of sight and a phone or cheap device inside doesnt work well. And battery drain. A cheap stick on tracker works well outside the car but they usually run on external battery so you need to charge it. More expensive devices can be hardwired and run on battery which is a better option. Then there are cellular fees. Do you want to text your phone to wake up the device to start using the battery? IE: its asleep until you wake it? Do you want a fancy software option to log in to check routing and location? Is your device transmitting all the time? You can get whatever you want and spend thousands on a personal gps system, just do your research and be mindful they all can be defeated very easily with a $15 gps 12v plug in jammer. And they wont work once they hit the chop shop or the shipping container to Nigeria.

 

Just wire in a kill switch.