Deciding on the best way to pay for airtime

Most of the cost of running an mTrak unit comes from the online updating. You can use just about any SIM card in the mTrak unit, but the cost will vary widely between operators.

The best value for using with the mTrak units comes from giffgaff or Vectone Mobile
They both offer good value for the small amounts of data that the mTrak units send, and neither rounds up data costs to 1p each time the mTrak unit sends data, nor has a flat rate per day. Also the mTrak units can find the remaining credit on either of these networks, to include in texts and send to the mTrak website.

giffgaff and Vectone Mobile are is MVNOs ( Mobile Virtual Network Operator) who buy capacity from the main UK mobile operators and sell SIMs with their own branding.

As far as we know, the main UK networks cost a lot more when used on mTrak than MNVOs cost

All the main UK networks are moving to charging for bundles with a fixed expiry time, which isn't any good for mTrak users.

This calculator can help you estimate the running costs on giffgaff:-

Contract SIMs are also available for customers who do not want to worry about the credit running low. Please contact us for details.

Minimising tracking costs.
Reducing the frequency of the updates will save money on PAYG. mTrak units with firmware versions 3.286 or higher store and upload many more positions each update. Far fewer updates, and less cost, are needed for the same number of positions. Any mTrak unit more recent than 3.20 can be upgraded, but it will need to be returned to mTrak for that to be done.