Every touring musicians big fear while being on the road is to have your gear stolen. You do your best to keep your gear together at the venue. Keeping a 3rd eye constantly on your and your bandmates’ gear – but where it gets sketchy is when the gear has to be in the van outside of the venue or while your sleeping on someone’s couch or while you’re at the hotel. The van is carrying thousands of dollars of gear and it’s a very attractive target for sure.
Gigbox Tuner
Over the last few days, I had conversations and saw posts about the St. Louis based Gigbox Tuner that contains a GPS tracker. The ability to track your gear is a very attractive idea – and makes a lot of sense. All the articles I saw about this were pretty limited on the details though. When we’re talking about GPS, we need to talk about a couple of important points. First off, if you’re GPS is inside of a road case and inside of a van, it will be pretty hard for it get a GPS signal. Problem number two, how does the GPS transmit the signal to you? Typically, I’ve seen GPS dongle devices that communicate, but need one of two things – cellular service or wifi. Now, if we go with the cellular service, that means monthly plans and fees. If we go wifi, this means it will only be able to connect to open wifi, and again, to get any signal when it’s in a hardcase, could be difficult.
I’m very curious how Gigbox will deal with this, and if you’ve heard about a solution posted somewhere (or if Gigbox is reading) please let me know and I’ll update this post.
What do you guys think about this idea? Comment below!
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6 years ago
Given the number of “Stolen gear alerts” I see on FB, I think it’s a great idea. There’s already a GPS enabled magnetic deal (I think it’s a lock, for a trailer) that will alert you if movement is detected while you’re asleep in the Sleazy-8 Motel room, and has GPS and a wireless plan that I think is $20/mo or so (been awhile since I read the article, so memory is a little foggy). Incorporated in musical gear? The only negative I can see is adding weight to a pedalboard. I try to keep mine as light as possible. I’m sure people laughed at the idea of a space-age type computer with a calculator and games and whatnot incorporated into a telephone.
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