GPS Tracker Troubleshooting Guide

First, check if your vehicle runs daily, as trackers charge while driving. A burnt-out but switched-on light can drain the battery. The GPS gives a good indication of your car battery health. For reference, vehicles can stay parked for up to 3 months without issues with a healthy battery. If you are concerned, we can send a technician to check battery health or verify the installation.

A wrong-looking location is rarely a defect. Five different things can cause it: the car icon drifting while the vehicle is parked, the tracker landing on the wrong street in a dense city, the location freezing while parked indoors, an old fix that has not refreshed because the tracker lost signal, and the accuracy ceiling of budget single-constellation GPS hardware. The sections below explain each cause and what to do.

Every GPS receiver continuously recalculates position, and small random errors make a stationary vehicle look like it is drifting a few meters in random directions. This is called stationary drift and is normal for any GPS device. It does not mean the car moved. If the drift exceeds 50 meters, the vehicle is likely in a city center surrounded by tall buildings, see the next section.

In dense city centers, GPS signals bounce off tall buildings and glass facades before reaching the tracker. The receiver sees the original signal plus several delayed echoes, which can shift the reported position by 10 to 50 meters and sometimes place the vehicle on a parallel street. This is called multipath interference. The position usually corrects itself once the vehicle moves into a more open area.

GPS satellites need a view of the sky. Underground parking, metal roofs, and dense covered structures block the signal entirely. When this happens, the tracker keeps reporting the last position it had before losing signal, so the map shows the vehicle frozen at the entrance or last open spot. The location updates again as soon as the vehicle drives back outside.

If the tracker temporarily loses cellular coverage or its SIM has no data, it cannot send new positions to the server. The map keeps showing the last received position until coverage returns. Check the device status in the app: if the tracker shows as offline, the issue is connectivity, not GPS. The position catches up automatically when the device reconnects.

Modern phones use multiple satellite systems at once (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) and combine them with Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation, which makes them very accurate. Budget GPS trackers like the Coban GPS-103 only use the GPS constellation, which gives them a typical urban accuracy of 10 to 50 meters. If you need sub-10-meter accuracy or quality indicators (HDOP, satellite count), the Teltonika FMC125 uses four constellations and reports accuracy on every position.

Intermittent connectivity is usually caused by weak cellular coverage in certain areas or a SIM card with low balance. Check your SIM data balance and verify the tracker reconnects in areas with good coverage. Consider upgrading to a multi-network SIM for better reliability.

Verify the alert is enabled and assigned to the correct vehicle. Check your notification settings to ensure your preferred channel (push, email, WhatsApp) is configured. For geofence alerts, ensure the geofence is large enough and set to the correct trigger type.

Common causes include: SIM card data exhausted, loose power connection (check if the tracker moved), vehicle battery issues, or cellular network problems. Check these items first. If the tracker was working and stopped suddenly, contact support with your IMEI for remote diagnosis.