Jan 18, 2008

Get It Back Dead or Alive

In a case of technology triumphing over crime, Salt Lake City resident Mike Petty unknowingly put the KUVA, a sophisticated GPS asset tracking device made by NovaTracker, to the test. Early one Friday morning, Petty awoke to the revving engine of his Christmas present, a Sportsman 800 ATV, which was being stolen.

After an unsuccessful chase of the thieves, the forlorn Petty contacted the police and filed a report. Then he remembered his ATV had been equipped with a KUVA, a portable, battery-powered tracking device that integrates GPS satellite tracking and GSM/GPRS cellular location reporting. The device can be set to report at fixed time intervals ranging from every five minutes to once daily, so it can function as either an asset tracking or portable vehicle monitoring device.

He immediately logged onto the NovaTracker website to see if the KUVA had transmitted its location and reprogrammed it to report every five minutes. In no time, he pinpointed the stolen ATV's location by satellite image to a garage behind a house less than two miles away. He re-contacted the local police and told them of the location. The perpetrators were arrested, and the ATV was recovered 15 minutes later, only two hours after being stolen.

"Had I not had the tracking device on the ATV, by accident, the ATV would have been MIA for good," Petty explained. "It's not really a holiday miracle, just technology that works."