Trackers for luggage, tools and gear

Crowd-network tags are at their strongest exactly where luggage goes wrong. An airport is the densest concentration of smartphones you will ever stand in. A baggage sorting facility is full of staff carrying phones. A delivery depot likewise. When a bag goes astray in that environment, a tag reports from inside the building, repeatedly, with a position accurate enough to tell an airline which terminal to look in.

That is why the now-familiar story — passenger knows where their bag is before the airline does — keeps happening, and why it almost always involves a tag that cost under forty dollars and nothing a month. There is no cellular tracking plan that improves on this, because the problem was never coverage.

The one adjustment worth making is where you put it. A tag clipped to the outside of a handle is a tag that a dishonest handler can remove in two seconds. Inside the lining, in a laptop sleeve, or under the fabric base is better. Several holders exist specifically to sit flat and out of sight inside a case.

Tools are different from luggage because the scenario is different: a tool box is not mislaid, it is stolen, and the person who took it may know about trackers. That changes what you are optimizing for.

First, the mount matters as much as the tag. A tag rattling loose in the bottom of a tool box gets found and thrown out. A screw-down or adhesive mount inside a case, or a purpose-made mount for a Milwaukee PACKOUT, means a thief has to be looking for it specifically.

Second, be realistic about the manufacturers' own systems. DEWALT's Tool Connect and Milwaukee's ONE-KEY tags are excellent inventory tools: they tell you which van a tool is in and flag what is missing at the end of a job. They are weak at recovery, because their crowd networks consist of other tradespeople running the same app, which is a rounding error against the Find My network. For recovery, hide a Find My tag.

Third, tag the case, not every tool. The realistic outcome of a van break-in is whole cases leaving, and a tag per case covers that at a sane cost.

The question we get asked more than any other in this category is whether a tracker can legally fly in a checked bag. The rule that governs it is the FAA's PackSafe guidance on lithium batteries.

The relevant distinction is installed versus spare. The FAA requires spare, uninstalled lithium batteries — including power banks and charging cases — to be carried in the cabin, not in checked baggage. A battery installed in a device is treated as part of that portable electronic device and is permitted in checked baggage. Lithium metal cells carry a limit of 2 grams of lithium content per battery, and a CR2032 coin cell holds a small fraction of that.

So: a tracker with its battery inside it, in a checked bag, is fine under FAA rules. A spare pack of CR2032s in the same bag is not — those belong in your carry-on.

Airlines may impose stricter rules than the FAA, and a few have tried. Your carrier's own policy page is the document that governs your specific flight. Check it, and check it for the airline you are actually flying rather than the one you usually fly.