Many years ago, on this very forum, somebody suggested a good DIY project was to knock up a device which exploded when 3 or 4 of it's kind were gathered within a few yards, and fitting them to "Hobby" type touring caravans (if you know what they look like, you'll know why ...).
Rather than piss around with "is it/isn't it" worry over tracking, surely the easiest thing to do is to drive the vehicle into a Faraday cage and thence into a Faraday barn ?
No they arent.
That?s wrong too.
I do every day.
His problem.
Easier said than done.
A hi-vis waistcoat and clipboard, especially if you're also smartly dressed, will get you into a surprising number of places if you're brazen enough to try it.
In this area of West London potential burglars casing houses dress up in hi vis coats and safety helmets offering to do all sorts of building work. I had a chap calling at my house with an immaculate Stanley Tools T shirt under his hi-viz jacket and immaculate De Walt or similar Boots that had clearly never been worn in anger.
Last week a few streets away I saw two similarly clothed chancers going house to house lugging a theodolite tripod, minus theodolite natch, around with them. Unlike with my chap who would have been hard to spot, these two would stand out a mile if plod arrived quickly enough so I invested
15p and dialled 101. I'm not sure if lugging an empty tripod around counts as "going equipped" but it would have been interesting to hear their explanation had plod actually arrived on time.michael adams
...
Just imagine how popular you'd be with all the other campers if you came back from the pub to find your alarm had been going off for ages. Much better to use a silent remote alarm and some sort of tracker, but for those to be useful they need to be hard to find and disable - if they were all fitted as standard, standard systems in standard places, then they'd be relatively easy to disable soon after the stolen vehicle had been removed.
I heard a story a few years back of a high end car being stolen, and the tracker showing nothing.
Until it was unloaded from the container in Rotterdam...
Andy
It happened to us on our last trip. We had just got on the park an ride bus in Bath ( we tow a car on a trailer), when the site warden called to say our alarm had been going off for awhile. We explained we were already heading back and would be about 20/30 mins. It was a hot day - the previous hot spell a month or so back- so fortunately a lot of the adjacent campers were also out and about, as we were. I visited those that weren?t and apologised for the noise etc. All were very understanding.
It isn?t uncommon. We were in Delft just after Easter. The people in a motorhome opposite seemed to trigger their alarm every time they opened the door. It was a rented vehicle ( company details on the side) and they didn?t seem to have got used to it.
Our campervan doesn't have an alarm - it may only be worth £15k or so today, but the list price of a new equivalent is well over £60k in Japan today. It only has a transponder immobiliser, no alarm.
If new, I would expect most insurance companies to expect you to have an alarm fitted. Some makes are considered more vulnerable and extra precautions are required. 70k seems to be the trigger point for a tracker unless the base vehicle or, if an A class, the locks etc are considered to be a better class. 80k and I would be surprised if a tracker wasn?t expected.
Many people have additional locks fitted to the habitation doors. Habitation doors vary, the better ones have multi-point locks. The poorer ones have a simple lock near the centre.
Vehicle alarms don't go off 'for ages' Unlike house ones.
I'm not sure my neighbours would agree after the episode with a damp Porsche Boxster and a dodgy battery.
You'd just be getting back to sleep and it would go off again. And again. And again.
I was kept awake several nights running by a faulty alarm on a KA, I did not know who owned it, so I put a note on the windscreen saying 'Please get the alarm looked at, as it is going off during the night' nothing else, the owner's husband (I later found out) took offence to this very polite note and apparently muttered all sorts of foulness against me (never came to anything, and they did get the alarm fixed.) quite bizarre behaviour, I thought.
House ones shouldn?t either but sometimes the timer doesn?t work. Ditto car alarms.
I think domestic alarms are supposed to cut out after 20 mins but heaven knows how many older designs there are still in service.
A cousin of my wife's, designed, built and installed his own alarm system and then went on holiday. The non-stop bell was remembered in the village for many years - it even got a mention at his funeal !
No it was round the corner but will be at a lawnmower race meeting this weekend just ending.
Wby on earth would anyone want to steal one of those ?
Perhaps a cat jumped on it .......
I put mine in about thirty years ago and that had an adjustable timer set to max is 20 minutes only.
I was tempted, just to move it to a layby and torch it.
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