Tracker GPS 'fixed'

Bob Farish4 months ago

I've been using a GT06 tracker in my car on the 'demo' server for some years (thanks Anton).
A few months ago, the GPS location became 'fixed'. There was regular data, but it was showing no movement. Even travelling hundreds of miles, it showed the same location at home all day, every day, though querying it via SMS showed the correct locations. It seemed that though the data was getting through via GPRS, it was somehow not correct. I deleted the tracker, and re-added it, still with no success.

Thinking the tracker itself had failed, I ordered a new one of the same manufacture, only to find that one was the same.

Eventually, after checking settings etc, I started a temporary server on my Windows PC at home, and directed the tracker to it, and it was showing movement. So it wasn't faulty.
I tried directing the tracker back to 'demo2', and then 'demo3', still with no success. I compared all the settings on the demo servers with my local one and they all tallied.

In the end I deleted the tracker again on all the demo servers, then added it on 'demo' BUT with a different name (and the same IMEI), and it started working!

As it's now working again, I'm going to leave it as it is, but can anyone help me understand what might have gone wrong?

Anton Tananaev4 months ago

Usually something like this indicates either that there's some error with updating the data or device reported a timestamp in the future, so it doesn't get updated with the current time anymore.

Bob Farish4 months ago

Hi Anton,

I left things as they were, and it worked for a few days, then stopped again. If I replay the route, it's 'fixed' again.
I'm baffled now, so will try moving to another demo server.

Bob Farish3 months ago

Returning to this - I've left my PC running with the server on it, and the tracker has worked perfectly for about 4 days. No loss of positioning, not getting 'stuck', and all trips correct. However, I can't leave it running like that.

So I've put it back on the demo server today, and it's been OK for several hours then shows it's stopped again.
I've just noticed in another post :- https://www.traccar.org/forums/topic/demo-server-track-limit/
that there may be a daily limit of 1500 updates on the demo server. I didn't know this.

I've exported the 'route' report from the demo server and from my PC the other day, to compare them. On the demo server, after about 1500 entries today, it just stops. On my PC it went beyond 2500, and didn't stop.

This ties in a little as my tracker is currently set to give an update to the demo server every 30 secs which equates to about 1500 updates = 12 hours. At one point, I did have have it set to update every 10 seconds. Looking back, I believe it came to a stop a lot quicker, which is now starting to make sense.

So - it's too late to recover today, but I'll set my tracker to update every minute instead. At that rate, I should see about 1440 updates in a day, which will hopefully keep it below this limit.

I'll report back...

Bob Farish3 months ago

Final Update?:
All seems to tie up. I tried setting the tracker to 5 minute updates, but it went off line after a short while. Experimenting, I've found it will stay online with an update frequency of every 90 seconds. Take it up to 120 seconds and it starts going off line again. So 90 seconds seems to be the optimum, for my tracker at least.

Further on this, I've installed an auto app on my phone such that when the Traccar app notifies me that the car is moving, my phone sends an SMS to my tracker to set the update to 30 seconds. When Traccar notifies me that the car is stopped, my phone sends an SMS to set the tracker update back to 90 seconds.

This seems to be the best compromise I can come up with to keep below the 1500 limit. A long journey of 4 hours say, will create 480 updates.

As I hope it only really becomes important if my car gets stolen, I can live with that, and will see how it goes.

Now, if only I could set the tracker odometer so it shows the same as my car odometer says...

Anton Tananaev3 months ago

That's something only admin or manager can set.