This is an excerpt from H. McDonald, H. Park and M. Lee, " GTS: GPS Tracking System," ECE 4532: Design I, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Spring 2003:

The GTS would be able to work in any area with cellular phone coverage, and as long as the vehicle is in a location covered with cellular service, the time to obtain its location would be only a couple minutes or less. It will require that it is installed in a vehicle that already has a car alarm installed for full functionality. If it does not have a car alarm to work with, the owner can still contact the GTS from their computer and disable the car, but the GTS will not automatically detect when the car has been stolen. The GTS will be able to be transferred from one automobile to another so long as the new vehicle has a car alarm, or it will again suffer the lack of automatic car theft detection. Compared to LoJack, there is a lot of interaction between the owner and the GTS.

Although we realize that our product will not eliminate auto theft, it will have an impact on theft recovery. The chance of quick recovery of a vehicle with a GTS installed is higher than the chance of any recovery of a vehicle without any tracking systems installed. Since the GTS will be able to track a vehicle in motion, it will also increase the chances of the thief being caught, which could be of relief to the victim.

The GTS is not meant to be a theft deterrent, but instead a theft recovery device. It is well known that a proficient thief can disable or bypass nearly any car alarm and there is no reason to think that the GTS would be immune to such practices. Instead, the GTS.s presence will remain hidden so that it can operate inconspicuously. This will allow the thief to be caught off guard since they will not even know that they are being tracked. To get around some of the practices that thieves use to disable a car alarm, the GTS will have its own battery backup. This is to prevent the thief from being able to disconnect the car.s battery, then disabling the car alarm before attempting to steal the car. As soon as the battery is disconnected, the GTS will activate.

Another method that thieves can use is just to cut the siren wires. If multiple sirens are installed, this may or may not set off the car alarm as it depends on the setup of the alarm. If it does set off the alarm and there are multiple sirens, then the GTS will activate if it is monitoring the alarm from one of the sirens that is still connected. However, if the car alarm is disabled before the GTS is able to detect that a theft is occurring, it will still be able to be contacted by the owner when they realize that their car is missing.