EYE beacons as insurance against theft in a fleet
A Teltonika use case: in a large fleet every vehicle is fitted with an FMB920 tracker and a hidden EYE Beacon, and a stolen vehicle whose tracker has been disabled is noticed by the fleet’s other vehicles.
A Teltonika use case: in a large fleet every vehicle is fitted with an FMB920 tracker and a hidden EYE Beacon, and a stolen vehicle whose tracker has been disabled is noticed by the fleet’s other vehicles. After a theft a vehicle usually disappears from the map within minutes: the thief finds the tracker, cuts the power or switches on a jammer. From then on the company knows only the last point. The Teltonika arrangement gives a second chance: the beacon in the vehicle carries on broadcasting its signal over Bluetooth, and any tracker in the fleet that drives past passes it to the server. The more vehicles there are in the fleet, the higher the chance that one of them will drive past the stolen one. That is why the solution is aimed at large fleets.
What this scenario solves
Vehicle theft hits car sharing, delivery, logistics and taxi businesses.
According to available reports, in South Africa between 2012 and 2020 the number of thefts grew to almost 20,000 cases a year.
Experienced thieves know about trackers and jam them or take them out.
A broken tracker or a faulty SIM card leaves a vehicle unprotected even without any theft at all.
Vehicle theft hits car sharing, delivery, logistics and taxi businesses. According to available reports, in South Africa between 2012 and 2020 the number of thefts grew to almost 20,000 cases a year. Experienced thieves know about trackers and jam them or take them out. A broken tracker or a faulty SIM card leaves a vehicle unprotected even without any theft at all.
The losses are shared out between several parties at once. The fleet itself, the banks and microfinance companies that lent against the vehicle, the insurers, the business owners — all with the same question: where is the vehicle and how do we get it back. Every such case costs money and time, so owners are willing to invest in protection if it is inexpensive and genuinely works.
The trouble with an ordinary tracker is that there is only one of it. A notification about jamming, about the case being opened or about the power being cut will arrive, and that is useful. But after that the tracker is silent, and there is nothing left to find the vehicle with. The last point on the map is the place where the thief removed the tracker, not the place he took the vehicle to.
What is needed is one more line of defence that does not require a second expensive device on every vehicle, does not depend on a SIM card and is not jammed along with the tracker.
What Teltonika offers
Teltonika proposes a pairing of two of its own devices: an FMB920 tracker on every vehicle and an EYE Beacon hidden in the same vehicle. The beacon constantly broadcasts its signal over Bluetooth, while the trackers of the whole fleet listen out and report to the server if the beacon of a stolen vehicle has appeared nearby.
Installation and setup
Fitting the device and configuring it for the fleet scenario at hand.
Data transfer
The device collects data and sends it to the monitoring platform; how often depends on the model and its settings.
Analysis and control
The person in charge gets reports and alerts and looks into what stands out.
The equipment. The FMB920 is a compact Teltonika tracker from the BASIC series for basic tracking, one of the most widely used in the range. The EYE Beacon is a wireless battery beacon with a service life of up to 10 years. Its housing has two holes for fixing, and if need be the beacon goes on with double-sided tape, so it can be hidden almost anywhere in a vehicle: behind the boot trim, under a seat, inside the plastic of the rear bumper.
How it works, step by step.
• Every vehicle in the fleet has an FMB920, and in each vehicle an EYE beacon is hidden as well.
• The vehicle is stolen and the tracker is removed or jammed. The beacon carries on broadcasting its signal.
• Another fleet vehicle drives past, and its tracker reads the beacon within range, up to 80 metres.
• The tracker sends the beacon data to the server together with its own coordinates.
• The dispatcher receives a notification and sees the approximate place where the stolen vehicle is.
If the beacon is spotted by several vehicles in a row, the picture becomes sharper: from several detection points it is clear which courtyard or which car park the vehicle is standing in.
Why a jammer does not help the thief. Typical jammers suppress the cellular connection and the satellite signal a tracker relies on. The EYE beacon works over Bluetooth and has no SIM card, so it carries on broadcasting. It has to be found physically, and for that the thief has to know it is there.
A broken tracker is a case for it too. The arrangement also helps when the tracker on a vehicle has simply failed or the SIM card has run out of credit. The vehicle stays visible to the rest of the fleet through the beacon until the tracker is repaired. For the dispatcher that is a signal: if a vehicle’s beacon is regularly spotted by other trackers while its own tracker stays silent, it is time to send it in for diagnostics.
How to choose a place for the beacon. The main rule is that the beacon must not sit where a tracker is looked for: under the dashboard, by the fuse box, near the OBD connector. It is better to choose places that require trim to be taken apart and are not visible on a quick look round the interior. Metal around the beacon reduces the range, so it is not hidden in a closed steel box. After fitting, the range is checked: another fleet vehicle drives past and it is seen whether the beacon is read.
An episode from a taxi fleet. At night a taxi fleet vehicle loses contact with its tracker while standing in the car park. In the morning a driver from another shift drives along a neighbouring street, and his tracker picks up the missing vehicle’s beacon in a courtyard two blocks from the car park. The dispatcher sees the mark, sends the shift supervisor there, and the vehicle is found before anyone manages to strip it or move it on.
Configuration and servicing. The beacons are set up through the EYE app mobile application: scanning, signal checking, debugging over Bluetooth. The EYE Beacon is compatible with all Teltonika trackers that have Bluetooth, and the firmware and configuration of the FMB920 are updated remotely through FOTA WEB, without taking the trackers off the vehicles.
The bigger the fleet, the better the chance. Every vehicle whose tracker has beacon reading switched on works as one more scanner. There are two conditions: the list of the fleet’s own beacons has to be configured on all its trackers, and one of the vehicles has to happen to be near the stolen one. The trackers send the sightings by themselves, but reacting to them is still the dispatcher’s job, and a notification is set up for him in the platform in advance.
How to tell that a beacon is alive. A vehicle’s own tracker hears its own beacon every day. If that beacon has vanished from the data while the vehicle is driving as usual, the battery has gone flat or the beacon has been moved or taken off: it is checked at the next service, without waiting for a theft.
What you get
A second chance to find the vehicle
Even if the tracker has been removed or jammed, the beacon stays in the vehicle and gives it away to fleet trackers driving past.
More vehicles, more chances
Every fleet tracker with beacon reading configured can spot a missing vehicle within the beacon’s range; the chance grows if the vehicles often drive through the same districts, but it does not guarantee a find.
Inexpensive and quick
A beacon costs less than a second tracker, needs no SIM card and no wiring, goes in within minutes and works for up to 10 years.
Best of all in large fleets
The more vehicles driving round the city, the higher the chance that one of them ends up within 80 metres of the stolen one.
Insurance against a breakdown
If the tracker has failed or the SIM card has been cut off, the vehicle is still visible through the beacon.
Savings on losses
Getting stolen vehicles back quickly reduces the cost of insurance claims and of buying replacements.
Why this solution
The solution rests on the fact that Teltonika trackers can read Bluetooth beacons out of the box. There is no need to install separate scanners or change the equipment — it is enough to configure beacon reading on the trackers and add beacons to the vehicles. The FMB920 was chosen as an inexpensive, widely used tracker, but the arrangement works with any Teltonika tracker that has Bluetooth.
Honestly about the limits. This is not an instant search: the vehicle will be found only if another fleet vehicle drives past. For a fleet of ten vehicles in a big city the chance is slim, while for a taxi fleet or a delivery service with hundreds of vehicles it is already appreciable. The place is determined approximately, from the coordinates of the vehicle that heard the beacon, so the last few metres are searched by eye. And a beacon can be found as well, given a long and thorough search of the vehicle, so the fitting place has to be unobvious and different on different vehicles.
It works well together with the FMB920’s own alerts: the tracker reports jamming or a loss of power, the dispatcher knows that something has started, and the beacon helps to find the vehicle afterwards.
How this works in Azerbaijan. The arrangement suits places where there are many vehicles and they are constantly out on the streets: taxi fleets and delivery services in Baku, car sharing and rental companies, municipal services, large distributors with dozens of vans across Absheron, Sumgait and Ganja. For small regional fleets whose vehicles rarely cross paths, the arrangement with a backup tracker is a better fit. When rolling this out it is worth allowing for the summer heat: the beacon is not hidden by the exhaust system or in places where the housing gets baked by the sun to its limit, so as not to shorten the battery life. GPS.az, as a Teltonika GOLD partner in Azerbaijan, fits the FMB920 and the EYE beacons, configures beacon reading and the alerts and brings it all onto the Wialon platform, where the dispatcher sees which fleet vehicle spotted the missing one.
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