Battery drain issue solved

I bought a F430 back in March, put in a new battery used it every few days until the middle of May when the rains came. Went to use it first week of June and the new battery was dead! Recharged it and found that there was a 130mA continuous load jumping to 300 mA. The manual states the max is 30 mA. After pulling every fuse in all the panels I found the AC main was pulling 110-280mA. I was a bit disappointed since the AC system is buried, as I was following the power wires I found that there was two tiny wires splices into the 50A main AC line. The two wires went to a black box above the glove box. Two more wires went to a battery that was glued to the first box. The last two wires just dangled. The box is made in Canada with only one marking on it. k1972665a along with a 14 by 14 dot pattern. I suspect it is some sort of tracking device installed by the first owner. Never the less, removing the box the current is down to 12mA which is ten to twenty times lower.

 

It does seem like a LoJack device, it was made from a Motorola 120 cell phone PCB, really, the board righ out of a Canadian cell phone, they even left the volume and power buttons, they only soldered the antenna wire where the antenna was connected. The other board has a transmit driver to the second antenna. The battery was a led asid battery which was dead and would not take the charge the board was trying to push to it. So it looks like someone could call and activate the transmitter which sounds very LoJack like. But since it draws so much current it gets retired. Maybe I'll pick up a modern day version. But as for now the total drain is only 12mA which should last 90 plus days. So far no issues.