New equipment

Occasionally, we receive a new piece of equipment that is just so good it begs to be used at every opportunity and just as we were when our new super vehicle tracking devices arrived, we are all very excited this morning about the arrival of our next generation GSM audio bug…

What we basically have are seven small black boxes, about the size of the new iPod shuffle, which will allow us to monitor audio activity in a room or vehicle from anywhere on the planet, providing we have access to a phone. Working on the GSM frequencies (the same as mobile phones) the device has a tiny SIM card inside it and thus a dedicated telephone number. Placed in a room, it will sit there quite happily for three or four weeks (or indefinitely if we plug it into the mains) until it picks up sound. When it does, it will then automatically phone a pre-set number (whatever we choose this number to be) and start broadcasting to us everything that it hears!

Obviously, at this stage we can arrange to have the broadcast recorded or simply listen in and take notes. Either way, the possibilities for the deployment of these new bugs are endless and thus sadly, we don’t anticipate being able to play with them for long before sending them out to work. We are not claiming that the GSM bug is a new technology as people have been rolling these out for a while now, but the audio clarity and sheer size of these devices are worth the excitement!

Having been in the business for so long, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the technology develops in our field. The last few years alone have seen massive leaps in the areas of GSM bugging and GPS tracking and now we have GPS tracking devices that, no larger than a matchbox, offer up to three weeks of tracking life before the battery dies. It seems like only yesterday that we were using devices for the same purpose that were larger than an old video cassette that would conk out after just four days on a car!

Ho hum, I ought to start naming these new bugs before nostalgia takes hold…

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