No one said a life of crime would be easy... A father & son team in Lindenhurst, NY made off with 14 GPS devices. Upon returning home, the GPS bandits looked more closely at their booty, and found out that they had not stolen cell phones, as they had originally thought, but instead had absconded with 14 GPS devices.
The men didn’t know what the devices were, and out of curiosity powering up one of the units. Shortly thereafter, Suffolk County police quickly zeroed in on the missing units using GPS tracking, which lead the police right to the man’s front door. The cops arrested the man, his 13-yar old son, and their 20-year old culprit on burglary and grand larceny charges. According to the Associated Press, the GPS devices were stolen from a local garage that installs GPS in snow plows, dump trucks, street sweepers, and other such vehicles.
This is interesting. I didn't know that GPS devices transmit. I thought they were just receivers. I thought that they just received GPS signals from satelites which they used to compute where they are. Why do they transmit? Were these GPS units the TomToms, Garmin Nuvis or what?
GPS receiver does not have the ability to transmit their location to anyone, one way this transmission can be achieved is to have GPRS sim card in a transceiver unit much like the ones use in a cell phone or even TomTom Work fleet GPS systems, most tracking and AVL devices that utilizes this method.
So I would guess the GPS that was stolen was tracking systems that is design to transmit location data to a server of some type.
I realize it's more than a year since these comments were posted, but for what it's worth, the post mentioned that the gps units were stolen from a business that installs them on snow plows, street sweepers, etc. So it would make sense that they would be transmitters as well as receivers, so the city could track the locations of their equipment. I'm guessing these weren't TomToms like you'd buy in a store.