Contractors, hire companies, and site managers

GPS alerts for equipment and trailers

Know within minutes if a trailer, generator, or machine leaves the yard — the window that decides whether it is recovered or gone.

Suggested setup

Zones
One zone per yard, site, or storage compound. Trace the actual compound rather than using a circle, so an adjacent road does not sit inside the zone.
Schedule
Active 24 hours a day for storage. On active sites, a common pattern is out-of-hours only — 18:00–07:00 plus weekends — so normal daytime movement stays quiet.
Devices
Battery-powered magnetic trackers for towable plant, hardwired units for anything with a power source. Battery life matters more than reporting frequency here.
Alerts
Push and email together. Theft alerts are the case where a delayed notification is the same as no notification.

Plant and trailer theft is a volume crime with a short recovery window. Equipment taken overnight is usually moved on within hours, and the odds of getting it back drop sharply after the first day.

Discovering the loss at 7am when the yard opens means the useful window has already closed. An alert at 02:15 is a different situation entirely.

Out-of-hours is the setup that works

The naive approach — alert whenever anything leaves the yard — produces an alert every time a machine goes out on a job. Within a week those are ignored.

The setup that stays useful restricts the zone to hours when nothing should be moving: 18:00 to 07:00 on weekdays, plus all weekend. Daytime movement generates nothing. A trailer leaving at 2am generates an immediate alert, and because it is the only kind of alert this zone ever sends, it gets read.

Geoblip sets the schedule per device per zone, so a machine that legitimately works nights can have a different window from the rest of the yard.

Choosing trackers for equipment

Equipment tracking has different constraints from vehicle tracking.

Battery life dominates. A trailer has no power supply. A tracker needing monthly charging will be flat when you need it. Look for large-battery magnetic units quoting several months — they achieve it by reporting infrequently, which is the right trade here. You do not need a position every 30 seconds from a parked trailer; you need one reliable alert when it moves.

Motion-triggered reporting is the feature that makes this work. The tracker sleeps while stationary and wakes when it detects movement, then reports frequently. Months of standby, fast alerts when it matters.

Mount it where it will not be found. Anyone stealing plant professionally knows to look for trackers. Inside a chassis rail beats stuck to the outside. Some operators fit two — an obvious one and a hidden one.

Metal blocks GPS. A tracker deep inside a steel box will struggle for a fix and may fall back to LBS positioning, which is accurate to hundreds of metres. Compromise between concealment and sky view.

Drawing the yard zone

Trace the actual compound with the geofence builder, and keep the boundary off any through road — a circle around a yard often includes the road outside, which means a trailer sitting at the gate reads as inside and one on the road reads as inside too.

Add 30–50 metres of margin beyond the fence. Equipment parked between containers or against a building gets poor GPS; see GPS accuracy.

What happens when it fires

You get a push notification and an email. The device keeps reporting as it moves, so you have a track rather than a single last-known point — which is what police need to act.

Position history matters here more than in most use cases: 24 hours on Pro, 30 days on Business. A track showing where a trailer went is considerably more useful than knowing it left. See pricing.

Being realistic about theft

A tracker does not prevent theft, and organised thieves increasingly sweep for them. Some jam GSM entirely, which defeats any tracker regardless of price.

What it does is compress the time between the theft and you knowing, from hours to minutes. Combined with locks, lighting, and immobilisers, that is a genuine improvement in recovery odds. On its own it is one layer, and it is worth knowing the limits before relying on it.

One practical note: register the IMEI somewhere other than in the machine it protects, and check the tracker reports before you need it. A tracker with a misconfigured APN looks fine — LEDs on, SMS working — and silently never reports. Test it once a month.

See how it works or start a free trial.

Terms used on this page

Exit alert GPS accuracy IMEI APN

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See all use cases →

Set this up in a few minutes

Draw the zone, add the device, choose the hours. Seven-day free trial, cancel any time.

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