OptiTrack

About OptiTrack

OptiTrack started in 2020 as a low-cost answer to a simple problem: how do you let parents, coaches and friends follow a sailing regatta when there's nothing to see from shore?

It began with LoRa

Back in 2020, the obvious approach — a SIM card and a mobile data plan in every tracker — was a non-starter. Data plans were expensive, commercial GPS trackers cost hundreds of euros a piece, and outfitting a fleet of 20 dinghies for a club regatta was simply unaffordable. So the original OptiTrack design avoided the mobile network entirely. It used LoRa (Long Range radio, developed by Semtech) on the licence-free 868 MHz band in Europe. Tiny GPS trackers broadcast a 20–30 byte payload every couple of seconds; a relay station on the coach or safety boat picked them up over several kilometres and forwarded the data to the server through a phone hotspot. No SIM in the tracker, no per-device contract, hardware around €20–30 a piece.

Track with anything

Things have changed since then. Mobile data has become dirt cheap — a few cents a day is enough to keep a tracker sending a position every couple of seconds — and the hardware market has caught up too. Mass-produced Chinese vehicle trackers now sell for €15–25 and have largely closed the cost gap that made LoRa necessary in the first place. So the platform has opened up: it now accepts position data from almost anything that can speak GPS.

• Mobile phones running free apps like Traccar Client or OwnTracks — useful for keelboats, coach boats and one-off events.
• Inexpensive Chinese vehicle trackers — the same devices sold for car and motorbike fleets, speaking common protocols like JT/T 808, GT06 or TK103. Pop in a cheap data SIM and they report straight to OptiTrack over LTE (older units still use 2G GPRS). Batteries last through a full multi-day regatta.
• The original LoRa hardware is still supported for clubs that already have it. Battery life is around a day, so units get charged overnight between race days.

Bring whatever you already have, mix and match across a fleet, and only pay for the days you actually race.