Thanks to GPS and the web, it’s possible to track virtually anything across the world. Rob Beattie rounds up some innovative tracking tools you can use for both practical and fun purposes
Track air traffic across the world
With its beautifully simple interface that superimposes thousands of planes on a world map, the mesmerising Flightradar24 (www.flightradar24.com) is every schoolboy’s dream. Double click a plane’s icon and the sidebar reveals its route, altitude, speed and landing time; and with Google Earth installed, you get a 3D view from the cockpit that enhances the illusion of flying the plane. Flightradar24 is searchable, too, so you can not only find a specific flight but also see planes being routed from a particular airport.
Planefinder (www.planefinder.net) uses similar graphics and lets you zoom into airports to see planes taxiing. Hover your mouse over an aircraft to display the airline, flight number and destination. Both Flightradar24 and Planefinder offer mobile versions, which are available as free 'lite' apps or for £2.99.
Find ships anywhere at sea
Shipfinder (shipfinder.co) looks brilliant and provides incredible detail on its world map, but it’s as slow as a 500,000-ton tanker, which takes some of the fun out of using the site. It’s worth persevering, though, to zoom into dredgers, passenger and cargo ships, pleasure cruisers, tankers and even military vessels. You can search by name, destination and call sign and, once you find a ship, display all manner of information - including whether it’s set sail and where it’s registered.
Marine Traffic (www.marinetraffic.com) is a nippier alternative and includes some funky features such as a density map - the busiest lanes in the English Channel are bright red - and thorough stats about individual vessels, including port calls, nearby ships, speed and destination. As with Ship Finder, there are a surprising number of photos in the ship database. Both sites have mobile apps and Shipfinder’s has an ‘augmented reality’ feature that claims to be able to use your device’s camera to recognise individual ships and pull their records from its database.
Find safe beaches by tracking sharks
Ocearch (www.ocearch.org) is a ‘jaws-dropping’ global shark tracker that collects data about hundreds of sharks from all over the world, courtesy of tiny transmitters embedded in their dorsal fins. Every time a shark’s fin breaks the surface, it ‘pings’ a satellite and the position is logged on the site. This lets you track individually named sharks (Philip, perhaps, or Septima) as they cruise up and down coasts or swim off into the deep ocean. You can filter results by gender, stage of life, location and activity, and double-click a shark to bring up photos, the date they were tagged and a recent-activity button that shows where they’ve been in the last 24 hours, week or month. There’s even a free mobile app that you can take to the beach with you - just in case!
It's also worth checking out Tracking Sharks (www.trackingsharks.com) and following the link there to Hawaii Tiger Shark Tracking (oos.soest.hawaii.edu), where you can choose a shark and animate its recent movements.
Spy on the spy satellites
At the time of writing, the amazing satellite tracker N2YO (www.n2yo.com) was tracking 17,142 objects through the sky. You can browse these using the ‘Most tracked’ or ‘Just launched’ menus; create your own personalised tracking list; or just orbit the Earth dipping in and out of categories to see only GPS, military or TV broadcast satellites, or just the brightest ones. Once you’ve selected a satellite, you can see its speed, altitude and position and, if that’s not enough, there are various multimedia extras including recordings of meteors as they enter the atmosphere and live HD images from the International Space Station.
Elsewhere, Satview (www.satview.org) does a good job of tracking miscellaneous satellites (dubbed ‘space junk’) as they re-enter the atmosphere. Watch the skies!
Track trains across the UK
Train Times (www.traintimes.org.uk/map) describes itself as a ‘vaguely live map’ and is worth a visit if only for the way it lets you experience the future of high speed rail, courtesy of the ‘Move trains at 10x normal speed’ setting. You can select any of 31 main railway stations and then watch little animated red dots moving in and out of them. Hover over a dot and you’ll get pop-up information about the train, including its destination and arrival time.
Never miss another delivery
Most courier services let you track your packages, but often the info is as vague as ‘‘despatched from depot" or ‘‘out for delivery". In contrast, DPD’s impressive ‘Follow My Parcel’ service (bit.ly/dpd373) does everything except put you in the van with the driver. Just supply the delivery company with your mobile number and email address, and they’ll not only give you a one-hour time slot for the delivery but also provide a link to a map where you can follow the driver en route to your house. You can also see where you are on the driver’s list and get an alert when they’re 15 minutes away. If you get held up, you can postpone the delivery to another day or ask them to leave the parcel with a nominated neighbour. It certainly beats waiting in all day.
Find a lost pet
Avoid the panic that sets in when your beloved pooch or puss disappears by equipping it with the Tractive GPS Pet Tracker (tractive.com/en). Combine it with a free mobile app for Android or iOS and you can find Fido and track down Tiddles if they decide to go wandering around the neighbourhood. It’s a subscription-based service that costs from €4.99 (£3.55) a month.
Locate your friends
If you want to know where friends and family are (but don’t necessarily trust them to tell the truth), then try Apple’s free Find My Friends app (bit.ly/find373). Your contacts can opt into having their location revealed on your phone, which is useful for organising nights out and tracking people who are prone to wander off, but not so good if you’re planning a surprise for someone or are having an extra-marital affair.
For something a bit more sophisticated, try Glympse (www.glympse.com) which offers timed ‘glimpses’ of someone’s location and is able to estimate how long it’ll take them to reach you, based on their current progress. It’s available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.