When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2016, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
Bicycle GPS Tracker GPS305 Real time
Amazon's catalog no longer lists this product (checked 2026-11-02). The name comes from the link HN users posted.
If the brokers aren't being found, the police aren't doing their job. GPS trackers for bicycles are now down to $47.[1] When you find more than one stolen bike at one location, you've got something.
This worked for cars. Lojack, with their hidden transponder, caused a significant reduction in auto thefts. Lojack claims a 90% recovery rate. The main problem for bicycles is battery life. Someone needs to design a system which needs almost no power until the bicycle is stolen.
Lojack, which is a pre-GPS technology, does something like that. Their unit normally isn't transmitting. It's just listening to FM broadcast station subcarriers for its own serial number. When a car with Lojack is stolen, Lojack, which is plugged into police stolen car databases, has their FM stations broadcast the serial number repeatedly. The addressed Lojack unit wakes up and starts transmitting. Lojack makes a deal with police departments to put Lojack receivers in police cars. These light up when there's a transmitting stolen car in range.
You could do this today by connecting a digital pager to a GPS/GSM location transmitter. The GPS/GSM unit is normally off, and only turns on when the pager wakes it up. You can get six weeks of standby time on a digital pager easily. Add a power-from-motion device and you could probably keep the pager running indefinitely, as long as the bike gets some use.
OK, IoT crowd, get moving.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-GPS-Tracker-GPS305-Real-time/...