Winplus AC13268-72 Beacon GPS Tracker Reviews
Winplus AC13268-72 Beacon GPS Tracker
- Continuously tracks vehicle location, speed, and time
- Multi-use product- monitor commercial drivers, track young drivers, etc.
- Completely portable
- Connects to Google earth or Google maps
- Easy to use, easy to setup
Beacon GPS Tracker by Winplus helps track your children, or your employees driving habits with this easy to use product. Track any vehicle’s location, speed and time with this Non-Real Time Tracking Unit. No subscription necessary just download the software to your computer, calibrate the tracker and you are ready to go.
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TK
March 15, 2012Good little gadget for the price,
I was needing a device with a “tracking key” type functionality, but did not need the tracking key price or ability to be hidden from view. This Winplus Beacon does the job. Just make sure you update the unit and software with what’s available on the winplus website – don’t use the included CD software. And remember to follow the short initialization routine the first time you use it.
PROS: Does what it’s supposed to do; keep a record of it’s gps location saved to memory. Has some selectable modes and recording rates, and a compass feature that can help guide you to pre-selected waypoints. The locational accuracy of the gps is very good. Unit starts up quickly and locks on to a variety of satellites well. The internal battery life seems good – I’ve only used it for periods of about three hours at a time, and that hardly makes a dent in the power meter bar. Plus it comes with a car power code. While in use, one can switch between various displays on the small screen such as latitude/longitude, speed/altitude, compass bearing, etc.
CONS: Clunky software. At first, it seems OK. Attach the unit and the program pops up and downloads the “trace(s)” from the unit. (a Trace is generated for each On and Off cycle of the unit, with 30 Trace ‘slots’ available, up to the memory limit of the unit).
If you double-click on a trace it opens a window showing the outline of the route taken on a grid, and a scrolling list of each waypoint with the time at that point. Not very useful though.
If you right-click on a trace you have options to save the trace or send it to Google Earth or Maps. If you send it to Google, it loads up and shows the starting point, a colored line for the route, and the end point. That’s it.
You can also open a trace in a second winplus program (available from the website) that will “analyze” the trace and send it to Google Earth with an additional bit of info marked and mapped: the location of the highest speed achieved on a route. That program also allows you to define a ‘speed limit’ setpoint that will then highlight any speed over that setting, and include placemarks on the Google Earth map. So this could be somewhat useful.
If you save it as a waypoint .txt file, that file includes latitude, longitude and date/time info for each recorded point. But, oddly and aggravatingly, the data does not include the speed or altitude info. This is annoying. The speed, at least, is being recorded in the unit, as evidenced by the speed tracking feature mentioned above. So why not include it in the .txt file of data? Not sure about altitude data, but again, if available why not utilize it?
I’ve been using the .txt file output and loading it into an Excel spreadsheet that converts it into a Google Earth .kml file. This gives me location tracking placemarks every five seconds along a route. Very useful for my needs, but I would have liked to have speed info there as well.
Summary: A useful little device at a reasonable cost, with some caveats.
If any Winplus employees read this; PLEASE improve the software and/or units flash code to utilize and output as much data as is available. Don’t limit what’s available.
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|M. Kohls
March 15, 2012Great Teen Tracking Unit,
This unit works just as advertised and is very accurate. Set up was reletively easy. All you have to do is install a couple small programs on your PC (I have Vista on my PC and the SW works great)and provide a link to Google Earth. Calibration of the GPS is about 5 simple steps. The only complaint that I have is the instructional text in the supplied manual and on line is a little hard to read (not that big of a deal). I bought this system to keep an eye on my teenager. I personally don’t look at it as a means of spying but rather a continual supervisor. Kids will drive better if they know that you can track them whenever you want. This system allows you to view where and when they drove as well as the speed of the vehicle along the route. This information is pulled from the system when they return home. This system will NOT send you this information real time as they are driving. If you want a device to do that with, plan on spending more for the GPS device as well as maintaining a service with a cell provider exclusive for the device.
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