Originally Posted by mev

Depends on your definition of "live". I haven't ever really wanted to have things tracked hour by hour in that sense of live. However, here is what I used to inexpensively post a short location update every day or two in remote parts of Russia in 2007:

1. Used a Russia SIM card with a basic unlocked phone (this was before smart phones).
2. Every day or two send a SMS text message to the twitter international # in UK. The SMS included encoded GPS coordinates along with the date and very brief note (this was also in early days of twitter).

We didn't have cell coverage every day, but the road we traveled paralleled the trans-Siberian railroad and some of the larger villages would have cell towers.

My father took those tweets and turned them into a short Wordpress blog post with GPS coordinates. A Google Maps plugin was used to plot those on a map. Sometimes my father would wait a day or two before posting the location for security reasons.

By 2013, riding Africa with TDA, technology had advanced that I was able to use a Smart phone along with local SIM cards for each country and an Wordpress for Android application to post these more directly. Again, we didn't have cell service every day, but surprising amount of places we'd pass in these countries with some cell service. The Android app would encode the latitude/longitude with the posts and a plugin put these on a map.

So if your goal is to reliably give a much more fine-grained hour-by-hour type progress tracking, then probably a spot type device is what you want.

If instead you want to have a brief location update every day or sometimes every two or three days, then either an Android wordpress app or lower tech, SMS messages sent to twitter - might be able to serve that purpose.