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I wonder if these could be used in your own car as a cheap car theft tracker. Things like Lojack don’t work outside of bigger cities. Be interested in understanding exactly how they work, type of communication and frequency of communication, whether app alerts could be set on movement.

Heh, yeah, that's a pretty big thing just to misplace. Of course, sometimes people have to take a cab home, and have no idea where they left their cars, so...

I wonder if these could be used in your own car as a cheap car theft tracker. Things like Lojack don’t work outside of bigger cities. Be interested in understanding exactly how they work, type of communication and frequency of communication, whether app alerts could be set on movement.

I wouldn't count on it. LoJack will find a car inside a garage. My wife was part of the rollout with the San Diego Sheriff's Office before we left San Diego. Excellent technology. The rub was the stolen cars were ending up in a garage in Tijuana that was controlled by the cartels. There is no way to get it back. Your insurance company won't pay for it as a loss because you know where it is. The bank won't forgive payments. A real no win.

Qualcomm marketed devices that worked with the CDMA towers. You could find a car inside a concrete parking structure in San Diego....right down to the floor.

The AirTag has limited reach. Low power Bluetooth. Perhaps a 10 meter radius of useful range from the tag to an iPhone that can "hear" the Bluetooth signal. Upon seeing the tag, the iPhone can report it's own GPS LAT/LON and the Bluetooth MAC ID as a coarse approximation of location. If it's your AirTag, the UWB support in the iPhone lets you do a low budget "transmitter hunt" to locate the tag. It works within 30 feet of the tag. You can also make the tag emit an audio alert to pin it down when you're within a couple feet.

I keep a Whistle 3 on my dog. It has GPS, WiFi and cellular. The battery needs a recharge about every 30 days. When the Whistle 3 can see my household WiFi, it knows it is "home" and switches the GPS/cellular off to conserve power. As soon as the device is out of my household WiFi, it switch the GPS on and transmits tracking "pings" with current LAT/LON. The app on my phone is notified that the device is outside the WiFi network and brings up a moving map display with the current device location.