Ralph: So tell us about your experience with the Zoombak. Gabrielle?
Gabz: One of the neat features of the Zoomback interface is, you can tell it to do an automatic, continuous track for up to an hour. I think this feature would be particularly attractive for someone who, say, had a dog with a penchant for running off.
Ralph: So if the dog got loose, they'd have a general idea of where that dog was, right?
Gabz: Right. Every five minutes it takes a reading and plots it on a map, so you can see where it's going. I wanted to see what the transmitter's range was like, so I talked my husband into taking it to a show. His band travels pretty far away for most of their gigs, and I know he's dead tired by the time he drives home. I usually spend those nights waking up every time a car passes the house.
Ralph: So he volunteered to be your "dog"...[laughs] and then you tracked him?
Gabz: [laughs] Yes! And it had no trouble tracking him, even though he was three hours away from here. I don't know that I'd use this feature all the time though.
Ralph: No? Why not?
Gabz: This type of auto-tracking has to be set up manually every time you use it, and only lasts for an hour. At the end of the hour, you'd need start a new tracking session. I liked the cool map at the end, but watching it plot isn't exactly exciting. I think they do that on purpose, to discourage obsessive tracking.
I held out for about half an hour — enough time to establish Zoombak did track the way it said it would — then I set my alarm for the time when when he would have been on the road and went to bed. When it went off, I texted Zoombak to see where he was. Using the Zoombak locator was nice because I didn't have to bother him on the road, and because I was able to predict when he'd come home, I got a good night's sleep.
Ralph: Hold on — you texted his location? How does that work?
Gabz: You can set up your cell phone to work with Zoombak's interface online — I could have just gone online and checked my tracking map, or I could have used the Location History feature, but that would have meant getting out of bed. [laughs]
Ralph: Tell me about the Location History feature. What is it?
Robert: It lets you get an on the spot update: every few minutes, you can ask Zoombak to give you an update, which it will plot on a map. If you hit the website and say, "Where's my device now?" it'll give you a reading based on when you asked that question, as many times as you hit the button.
Ralph: So it sounds like you two put this Zoombak through it's paces. What about you, Robert? Tell me about the experiment you did.
Robert: I gave the Zoombak device to one of our co-workers and told him to get lost, basically — to go for a drive. I went to Zoombak's website and got ready to trace it using one of the "real-time" options we told you about. In advance of that, Gabrielle set up Crutchfield as a"safety zone".
Ralph: Now what is that?
Robert: A safety zone is an area that you designate for monitoring, using Zoombak's website. You could, for example, set your house up as a safety zone, and program Zoombak to text you, or send an email whenever it detects the Zoombak device has entered or left that designated area.
Ralph: So if you were out for the night, and you had a teenager, and you asked him, "Please be home by 10pm", you would know if they actually got home by 10pm.
Gabz: More like, if you were out for the night, told you teenager to stay home, you'd get an alert if he took the car somewhere. All safety zones do is tell you whether it detects the device is within the zone, or not. Now, in your example, you mentioned clocking a kid by zone alerts. That's fine, but be aware that the Zone Alert feature is a lot more dependent on cell phone technology, and that can change how the information is gathered and presented.
Ralph: Really? How so?
Gabz: If you live in an are of spotty coverage (like we do), you may find the zone alerts don't always come through, and the time isn't always accurate — the notification system time stamps on when the cell tower sends the GPS notification. Depending on the safety zone, and the area you're in, you could easily have a situation where say, your car (equipped with a Zoombak device) got home at 6pm, but because the cell message was delayed, you receive the alert time-stamped for 8pm.—
Robert: — so if you're not aware of this, you could very easily misunderstand it to mean the device got home at 8 o'clock when in fact your child's been there all along, since 6 o'clock. At least for our area, I found the Safety Zone feature worked better when I limited it to a specific schedule — that way I had a better idea when it was actively monitoring, and when we were having transmission issues.
Ralph: Let me make sure I understand: if you tell it to monitor your house from 2-5pm every day, it'll do that, but the rest of the day, it won't be monitoring your house?
Gabz: Exactly. Now, as long as it's actively monitoring, it should also tell you when the device actually enters and leaves a safety zone, but like I said, we've found this is very dependent on your cell phone coverage and reception.
Ralph: Now here's a question: At least where I live, cell phone service is really spotty — If I've got bad reception, is it still going to be able to track?
Robert: The short answer is yes, because it's a hybrid of GPS and cell phone techology, it should track you a little better than either one could do on its own. But it's still limited by what either technology can pick up, so it'll be more reliable in some areas than in others.
