Originally Posted by
under_exposed
What would be the issue with taking one of your old phones (admit it, we all have a stack of them), putting a PAYG sim with roaming data in it and use your phone to track it?
I have set my phone to be able to track my wife's phone following its loss once.
The only downside I foresee is battery life. When the phone is shielded or unable to connect to a tower they mostly compensate by increasing the signal output power, draining the battery at a pretty good clip. If there was an app that would control that aspect it is certain that the phone has all the components to do even more than a tag does; tags depend on being discovered by cell phones and it is the cell phone that provides the location data. Using a phone instead of a tag skips that intermediate step.