Hey, they're tracking you.

A friend of mine has been complaining that her car's battery was slowing dying. I attributed it to a weak battery, and maybe a light switch getting stuck on intermittently.

As any good friend should, I promised (and finally did) show up with all the right tools. Battery load tester, multimeter, and every size of wrench and socket. I was fully expecting to see the battery was weak, the alternator was doing badly, or that I'd have to disconnect a switch.

Nope.

I spotted this fuse a while back. I assumed it was just some car audio thing from a past owner. Usually when I find them, they go nowhere. This one was drawing current. Just about as much as you'd see from an interior light staying on. 0.168A or 2W.

Hold on, does that say GPS and cell? It's a tracker. Neat. Ok, lets extract it.

[follows wires]
GPS receiver and cell antenna puck on top of the gauge cluster.

Snipping like a million zipties, and now we can look at what we're dealing with.

That part number seems worthless. It doesn't appear to be a one-off item. In some quick searching nothing useful was found.

For VRIV207R, there's a 10 year old question on Yahoo Answers, where he was just told that he was probably wrong about the number. (He wasn't)

For "19-24847-938", there's one result for a Mercedes antenna module. (It isn't.)

Input 1 (blue) comes from ... the airbag?

Input 3 (yellow) keyed hot.

Output 1 goes to a relay that connects red and white. Oh, an ignition cutoff. It's put back together like it should be now.

That's a whole lot of stuff that didn't belong in her car. It's extracted now.

This gratuitous cat tax photo isn't random. He showed up, and climbed into my SUV while I was working on the car. He wandered off before I left. I told my GF that we almost adopted another black cat. She says "no".

As a proper nerd, I asked to keep it, so I could tear it apart at home. :) And, as a proper nerd, I'm oversharing the details. Maybe someone will have an idea of who it was talking to, and what I can do with it. Most of the board numbers don't return anything interesting.

The GPS board has a SIRF GPS2e/LP-7450 chip.
The "GPS102REV:02" is useless as it's so ambiguous.
i3409 or l3409 don't seem to be anything. "13409" doesn't relate to this device.
I assume the SST flash memory is for warm starts, and the battery is to keep the clock alive.

There are no useful markings on the reverse side.

This is the top of the main board. Obviously, the microcontroller is an Atmel AT89C55WD. The sticker repeats that "VIRV207R" number, shown on the case.

00-24878-001, WG03AL201-0, PU00 doesn't seem to relate to anything.

The reverse side only says 00-24868-001 REV D

I haven't traced them, but it looks like the TX/RX pins on the MCU may go to some of those fingers.

This is the modem. I like the model number, "NSA1800". We joked that the number means that it belongs to the National Security Agency. Really, it's pretty obvious that it relates to "Niigata Seimitsu [something]".

I'm guessing the manufacturer of the box put the sticker on the right on. It appears to be a duplicate of the exterior sticker.

It seems, that model number says that it's an AMPS cell transmitter. Service in the US was discontinued in 2008. So that makes this part useless, except for extracting metals for future projects.

I'm still hopeful that I can use the GPS receiver in something. Maybe even the control board. Anyone with info and maybe interface pinouts, would be most appreciated.

We can still pretend it's the NSA though. A good conspiracy theorist would say that they may have their own AMPS towers still operating, just to keep tracking their boxes without being noticed. I'd need my tinfoil hat adjusted a little too tight to believe it.