AMERICALOC GPS Tracker. GL300 MXW Series. No subscription required. Pay as you go. Magnet included.

I bought this product and one other to track my child who is visiting her mother who is currently in Texas for the holidays. We are currently in a custody case for our child who currently lives with me (the mother lives in Mexico). In an effort to insure that my child does not leave the country but still has the opportunity to see her mother, I am using this product to track my child's whereabouts using GPS location, GeoFencing, and email alerts for various situations. I placed this product in a pocket in her backpack, another similar product in the lining of her suitcase, and further a third (software) on her phone. I figured between the three at a minimum one would make it through any attempted abduction and give me ample opportunity to alert the authorities at the border. So first, the purchase, delivery and setup of the GL300W was very easy. I did the setup online and the purchasing of the plan was smooth. The device activated within about 10 min and was showing location in my home. I also setup the competing device and the cell phone at the same time. Similar experiences with those as well. I needed to run a trial prior to my child leaving for Christmas break with the other parent. So, I setup a geofence around my home and around the school property and set the distance of the fence at 0.1 mile. I put the unit in the school backpack. I setup the alerts that I wanted to receive in email for the events I needed. The trial lasted about 8 days. I was pleasantly surprised that I knew when my daughter left home and arrived at school in addition to seeing the exact route that was taken to school and then back home in the afternoon. This allowed me to verify on a daily basis that my daughter was where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there. I had a problem with the competing product at the beginning in that when my daughter returned home from school it was showing that it was still at school. This product (GL300W) worked flawlessly and did not have this glitch. The 8 day trial was successful. My child left for Christmas and the unit tracked perfectly from our home to the airport. It lost connection during the flight due to no cell service at altitude, but picked up signal again when it landed in Texas. It has now been a full two weeks and it has tracked without fail with approximately 30% battery life remaining. My daughter is due back tomorrow so I will see how it tracks back home from Texas. I emailed customer service about the ability to track into Mexico and was assured that the product will work internationally. Customer service has been awesome so far and very responsive getting back with me within a few hours. Their pricing is very reasonable for what I was looking for, there is no long term contract required, and I cannot put a cost on the safety of my child and my peace of mind relative to that goal. The product does what it says that it will do and does it well from what I see so far. I was skeptical initially, but those doubts have passed. This product is reliable. All transactions and tracking is done via a web browser. If I had one recommendation for improvement it would be to have a user friendly app for Android or IOS. I am fairly computer literate so I was able to figure out what I did not understand. There are also videos on Youtube which can help you out with questions.

Pros up front, Cons at the bottom. The 300w with AMERILOC is a fantastic bit of hardware. I work in private security and was already familiar with the AMERILOC systems so it wasn't super difficult for me to pull the trigger on some personal hardware, but I wasn't expecting private offerings to last as long or be as accurate as they've proven to be. Keeping it set to update location every 5 minutes has the battery lasting for almost a month, and even kicking it down to every 30 seconds lets it run for over a week before needing a 6 hour charge. My preferred settings are to set up for 5 minute updates during the day and 20-30 second updates during the night, with movement notifications on and tight geofences setat all times. You have a full suite of notifications preferences, past location viewing/export settings, static and route-based geofences, location update intervals from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, and a surprisingly well flushed out wired-in power adapter market. It also seems to pe pretty dang tough. I run one in a buzzy stunt motorcycle that gets suplexed into the pavement hard enough to bend steel regularly, and I haven't had a single issue with the 300w hardware or function. Also those twin hurricanes gave it a good wet spritz and I've seen no issues after drying it off. Says something for reliability but I definitely don't recommend letting it get wet, its not intentionally built to be water resistant. That problem is solved easily enough with a ziploc bag though. Pricing seems fair. $20/mo per device added to your account, but they're always running the "buy your first month and get 2 extra months free" promo so it gets you started strong. Check with your insurance, most offer $10-20 off your bill per month if you have a vehicle "secured with gps" so in many cases the device pays for itself. There are only 3 big cons First is the fact that not only is there no app but the website is a bit clunky on mobile. It is totally usable, and 100% awesome on pc or tablet, but clunky none the less. They have recently improved this with a setting that re-organizes the web page to be more phone-friendly too. Second (and a bit irrelevant) is that this device is pretty chunky to accommodate that battery. Excellent for vehicles (with some creativity even small vehicles like pit-bikes) but you're not going to be able to have this in a purse or pocket without noticing. Now if you have a huge purse or backpack and are completely oblivious then I can't say for sure what extra weight you will or won't notice. Third and last is that there are very limited case options. Its pretty much leave it bare or put it in one of those big magnetic super-tough pelican box looking cases. I have a 3D printer so I just printed out a quick thin protective case and added a shock absorbing layer later as well after a few harsh crashes just to be sure it didn't get too banged up over time. For anyone without access to a 3d printer id say just use 3 large rubber bands (2 wrapped around the body horizontally and one length-wise) and it'll be protected from 90% of what you throw at it. But as far as buyable offerings? There's really none. Overall solid 8.5/10 purchase and I plan to buy 2 more as soon as I can. Will update the review if anything changes.

I purchased two different GPS's to compare, this one and Tracki. I ended up keeping the AmericaLOC because of its performance but I really wanted to like the Tracki because of the more modern web and app interfaces. Just its performance wasn't up to par compared to AmericaLOC. I used both for a month before I decided to keep AmericaLOC. My Use - I put the tracker in my son's book bag to see when his bus leaves/arrives at school. And when he is returning from school so I can time the bus drop off. Several times this year our bus has been 10 - 20 min early, and 15 - 20 late. PROs - Pricing was cheaper - I could get 10 second updates - Very accurate and would update fairly quick once the GPS started moving (Tracki was taking 20 min at times to initially update). - size was comparable to Tracki with extended battery pack and AmericaLOC picture with the coins accurately gives a size estimate. - Battery life is great. I get 2 to 3 weeks with my use, updates set at 10 seconds. - GPS seems to be solid, well made. It doesn't feel like it will fall apart. - Unlimited texts. I have it set up to receive a text when my son's bus leaves the school, and another when he enters our subdivision. Tracki you only get 30 texts per month unless you pay for more. CONs - The cell app and web interface seem like it was developed in the 1990's. I am not sure who uses boarders around their icons anymore, but they do. SUMMARY If you can get past the ugliness of the web interface and phone app, this GPS seems to be perfect for what I use it for.