Invoxia LongFi GPS Tracker Review: Helios use hot spots to find your valuables

If they have GPS trackers you’ve been a part of the mainstream for decades, until you can find dozens of products available from mass market vendors for less than $ 100. GPS tracking is still not as easy and straightforward as what you see in spy movies. The units require a large extra battery if you want it to last more than a couple of weeks and require an expensive monthly service plan. If you’re looking for a little peace of mind, stealing your car — or if your teen doesn’t come home before you go home, when you can find it — can become an expensive GPS tracking.

Enter the Invoxia LongFi Tracker, a simple device that offers many features like GPS tracking, but with a much longer battery life (charged in four months) and no monthly service fee.

The secret of this new tracker Helium LongFi salt, which rewards people with a fascinating wireless system Helium (HNT) cryptocurrency when they set up and manage a compatible point. The LongFi network is converted to LoRaWAN (a WAN Long Range that offers 200 times the range of Wi-Fi) that operates in the US-licensed 902-928 MHz band and is designed for low-bandwidth. district transmissions.

Typical uses of LoR include door sensors, actuators (such as a garage door opener), and device tracking, all things that don’t need to be pinged to the network from time to time. LongFi adds a blockchain to the mix, so every time a compatible point receives and processes one of these pings, it adds a time and location stamp to its blockchain. Over time, hot site operators who process these blockchain transactions earn HNT in proportion to the work their hot spots do.

This has little to do with Invoxia’s follower. It uses the LongFi network as a backbone to send location data. You will not earn HNT by purchasing or using your Invoxia device, but when you go through a compatible charging point, the owner will get it. As it turns out, there are a lot of things around: more than 130,000 as I’m writing this. You can see where they are all useful map. (It’s also important to keep in mind that your phone will regularly appear on your phone’s location services to update your location, if you’re around. To find out more later.)

Concealment

The device itself is nothing special: it’s a small plastic rectangle with no buttons or switches, just a micro USB port used for charging. It can easily be confused with a USB power bank or (according to my daughter) a vape pen, although the inclusion of a small strap adds to the look of fashion.

All the functions of Invoxia tracker are managed through the mobile application. To use it, simply connect your device to start charging and then connect within the Bluetooth application. The system asks you some questions, such as what you want to track (car or backpack, for example), and how often you want to check its location. This can range from standard (every 10-14 minutes) to high (every 2-4 minutes), which will have accuracy and battery life. An integrated tilt sensor can detect and alert you if the motorcycle you are tracking is overturned.

I tested the device in my car for a few weeks, wearing Invoxia shooting around the bay. I was skeptical that it would be worth anything — it’s not in the hottest place in my helium and a few in the town where I live — but I was immediately surprised to see it in the travel map app I made with each trip. I took it.

After a week of testing, however, I realized that much of my luck was that Invoxia was working on my phone’s location services instead of using the Helium network directly. I turned off Bluetooth on my phone, and my movements quickly died down in days. Until I ventured into more urban areas, including the heart of San Francisco, the system didn’t start recording location pings. They were quite a few, and much less than what the Helium maps would suggest. The goal is for Invoxia to work well in places where there are more hot Helio sites (or if you’re close to your phone), but don’t expect to create a minute-by-minute log of that Route 66 road.

Although some parts are missing individual data, the overall picture that the system paints over time is effective. The map view is fun, and it’s easy to zoom in or out in a single day to see the movement of the last six months at once. If you need a more accurate resolution, Invoxia also makes a tracker that uses the cellular network as its backbone, but it comes at the expense of battery life.

The battery life of this non-cellular version seems good. In my tests, the device scored 88 percent after a week of use in the highest frequency update setting. It is also worth mentioning that if you have a spare USB port in your car, you can leave the Invoxia tracker plugged in and worry about the battery at all.

The tracker costs $ 129 and includes three years of service (after which the company says you will be able to renew your service plan for a reasonable fee). It’s much less than classic GPS trackers, considering the cost of a subscription. Although the resolution is perfect, it is enough to keep track of your valid objects. If helium takes off and becomes a global phenomenon, the vision of the device is improved.