How we know our caravan is still at the storage ?

Want to share a recommendation of a great product which I recently fitted.

 Unfortunately, the closest caravan storage facility to us is about 25minutes drive away, so checking that our caravan is still at the storage site a couple of times a week is unrealistic. 

Our caravan, a new Eldiss, does have a tracker, the kind where you phone them when you realise the caravan is missing, and they work with the police to recover. But this of course is a reactive process, the tracker company do not proactively inform us if it is stolen. 

An addition challenge for us is we occasionally go abroad for quite a few weeks with the caravan left at the storage site as normal. 

So what I wanted to a device that could tell the location of our caravan. 

After a few false starts, we found a great solution by using a GPS tracker (which is completely different to the factory supplied tracker/tracking service). The GPS tracker I fitted is commonly installed on motorcycles or fleet vehicles (such as lorries). The model number is a TK104, doubtless made in the orient and sold and branded by numerous makes. Just Google TK104 if you are interested.

Logically the TK104 unit is virtually a smart-phone (but without the display screen nor a keyboard). But otherwise very similar it has GPS (so it knows its own location) it has GSM and a PAYG SIM card (so it can receive phone calls and it can send SMS text messages) and like a smart phone it has some smart programmability. 

Key features that are useful to me are:

- it sends me an SMS text message at 9am every morning to confirm its GPS location including a Googlemaps link

- it is set to send me an adhoc SMS text message if it starts to travel in excess of 30mph

- it is set to send me an adhoc SMS text message if its location changes by more than 500m.

- Additionally if I want to confirm the location on an adhoc basis, then I simply ring the unit, it then replies with a location SMS text message.

 This scheduled location text could be every 5mins if you are paranoid enough to pay for that many SMS messages.

 If you pay the extra for a SIM service which includes data, then rather than receive SMS texts, the tracker can instead send data to a website where you can log in to view the location - but I don't use this as a daily SMS suffices. 

Of course, this tracker is no good in terms of recover as I understand the police are unlikely to act on the info - but that is what the factory tracker does. I also so know so of the more top end caravan and other brands have more proactive trackers built in. But for the rest of us, I'd thoroughly recommend this unit. 

In terms of ease of installation, simply run the black + red power leads to the leisure battery (I believe the power the unit draws is pretty low so ought not to substantially increase power drain (plus the unit can be set to put inset to sleep and wake up occasionally to confirm location). Also I used the extra GSM & GPS aerials that were included to maximise the chances of getting the daily SMS. I personally didn't work to hard to make the installation completely hidden. Someone stealing a van is likely to find and rip out devices no matter how well hidden, but in that case I'll notice that the daily SMS text stops. 

Prior to the TK104, I had 2 failed attempts to install the cheaper TK103 tracker. On paper the features are similar but the TK103 seemed like an older design, I suspect one of the reasons why it was tough to get it working is it requires a  2G SIM and network (whereas most of the cell companies are investing in improving their 3G and 4G coverage and some cell companies do not support 2G such as the 3 network). Also an advantage for the TK104 is a bigger built in battery (i.e. it will carry on sending SMS for longer if the leisure battery was disconnected by a theft) and unlike the TK103, the TK104 has a sleep function where it can for example put itself into minimal power consumption standby, then wake itself up to a schedule, send an SMS and if there are not any location or speed alarms then it goes back to sleep until tomorrow. 

If anyone else would appreciate this form of reassurance - then I recommend the TK104