How safe is my bike outside?

[michael]

Cheers for the advice. I'm gona do it. Thought it over last night and the bike will never be home without me being home to (except some weekends for a couple of hours when I'm on the piss). Its in clear view of 4 neighbours and I'll have a chat to them to get them to text me or call the cops if they see ANYONE other than me touching it. If it gets stolen I'll just have to save up and get a new one :-) And I'll just put an alarm on it so if it does get touched it'll wake up the whole neighbourhood. Rust isn't a problem and excess, well I'm with kiwibike (swan), getting a 600 insured with speeding tickets isn't as easy as a 250.

[Little Miss Trouble]

Ok, there are perverts out there who steal Suzuki's but c'mon, an SV? Crims have standards y'know.

Well yes, this is why I have no problems with leaving it parked where it is while I piss off to Aussie on business

[90s]

Today I posted a thread about bike theives operating in the central area. They are very active at the moment.
http://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/sh...d.php?t=109445

[HungusMaximist]

I'd say don't chance it. If they want it, they'll take it. At least do everything you can to deter them (alarms, chains, locks...)

People will steal anything these days.

[scracha]

Cheers for the advice. I'm gona do it. Thought it over last night and the bike will never be home without me being home to (except some weekends for a couple of hours when I'm on the piss). Its in clear

Or when you're on holiday, or when you get lucky, etc etc. If a car alarm goes off does anybody even bother to look out the window these days?

How thieves operate:-

• 2 or 3 burly blokes arrive at your place in a soundproofed transit van.
• Bolt cutters, power saw, etc cuts through your security like a knife through butter
• Bike is lifted into van.
• Burly blokes jump into tranny van and fuck off into the setting sun.
• Whole process takes two minutes TOPS. No way cops or anyone else will respond in time.

You pay a shitload excess. Insurance company gives you a derisory offer. You find your premiums quadruple.

[YellowDog]

Or when you're on holiday, or when you get lucky, etc etc. If a car alarm goes off does anybody even bother to look out the window these days?

How thieves operate:-

• 2 or 3 burly blokes arrive at your place in a soundproofed transit van.
• Bolt cutters, power saw, etc cuts through your security like a knife through butter
• Bike is lifted into van.
• Burly blokes jump into tranny van and fuck off into the setting sun.
• Whole process takes two minutes TOPS. No way cops or anyone else will respond in time.

You pay a shitload excess. Insurance company gives you a derisory offer. You find your premiums quadruple.

I suspect that many have a false sense of security because they live in good areas.

Crims have wheels and will travel to wherever the rich pickings are available.

[steve_t]

I wouldn't worry too much about the gps tracker, they're cool but not perfect. That one linked is friggin cheap though, probably worth getting one just to have a play! Unless you can get a history of where the bike has been, then it won't be that great. If it is in someones shed then you'll get readings up to 40-50m out, and if you say to the cop 'oh, my bike is in one of these two blocks in mangere, they're going to facepalm and walk away.

Isn't GPS resolution less than 2 metres these days?

[bogan]

Isn't GPS resolution less than 2 metres these days?

outside it's bout that, inside sheds, or vans ive seen it 10-20m out, or no signal at all

[jono035]

Isn't GPS resolution less than 2 metres these days?

With good signal strength that's mostly true, although it doesn't take much to upset things so your accuracy starts to drop.

If you're under any form of cover then it gets dramatically worse. We had mobile plant with GPS trackers (SirfSTAR III 20 channel high sensitivity receivers) that would wander all over the show when they were parked in the sheds (corrugated iron roof with polycarb sections every 2 metres). Now that I think about it it was probably even worse, more like +/- 100m. It wasn't evenly spread too, was quite often a massive group of points all over the place, offset from where we knew they were by 40-50m...

That was when we had once-per-second data for an entire day or week and knew for certain where the things were, I'd hate to try extrapolate where they may be from a handful of points if the signal strength was crap...

Edit: We had a play with some +/- 20mm accurate RTK corrected units (they use a fixed point base-station to provide corrections from) that would be perfectly fine but as soon as they were even near a building everything would fall to pieces and they would be 20m out without so much as a warning.

[jono035]

outside it's bout that, inside sheds, or vans ive seen it 10-20m out, or no signal at all

I wish I had saved screenshots of the program we designed to track, search and display the tracker locations, it was pretty amazing seeing a machine that you know has been parked up for a week (the engine caught fire) wandering all over the site (I think at one point it took off over a main road and set of shops apparently).

Edit: The equipment it was installed on was probably about 8m end to end, if we had of got 10-20m inside the sheds we would have been stoked beyond belief! Just looked at google maps to see what the scale of our maps were. I remember laughing about the fact that a vehicle with a destroyed engine had driven off the edge of the wharf. It turns out this is over 200m away. Go figure.

The biggest problem is that it is quite often all but impossible to detect how good the signal is, the data spat out of the GPS itself (even the extended satellites in view data) just doesn't give you enough to work off. The data is also pretty stable on a minute by minute basis. The position probably changes at a rate of a few metres an hour?

[steve_t]

How about A-GPS triangulated via Cell sites? Anyone know how accurate this is?

[crazyhorse]

Don't think it really matters how safe a bike is inside a garage, or outside. IF they want it, they'll take it anyway.

My bike's been outside for the last 12 months - moving into a big double garage tomorrow though

Otherwise, make sure it is fully insured.

[jono035]

How about A-GPS triangulated via Cell sites? Anyone know how accurate this is?

cell site triangulation is pretty hit and miss for the same reasons.

GPS positioning is done by timing, cell site triangulation is done by signal strength. Timing is inherently a better way of doing it because it doesn't matter if you've got a tree in the way, but then it is more susceptible to multi-pathing affects (getting the same signal directly and then bouncing off a building as well).

I don't know how readily you can get access to the cell site info to triangulate from...

I figure GPS to get you close then a loud fuckoff siren that you can hear from a block away that you can remotely trigger. Tracking beacon would work as well but that's a little more random.

Actually, maybe fit an air-horn and have it so the tracker can sound the horn continuously?

That's what I'm doing when I've got a bike worth more than the cost of the tracker and air horn combined :P

[The Pastor]

jono, if you know the neighbour hood it is easy to find a stolen bike in it. I found a workmates stolen bike because he saw it been ridden a week later in albany.

all you have to do is spend half a day driving around the street its on and you'll spot it pretty quick. - all the time getting updates from your gps

[jono035]

jono, if you know the neighbour hood it is easy to find a stolen bike in it. I found a workmates stolen bike because he saw it been ridden a week later in albany.

all you have to do is spend half a day driving around the street its on and you'll spot it pretty quick. - all the time getting updates from your gps

Oh yeah, for sure, just saying don't expect it to be 'oh, bikes gone *send text* check google maps, find out it is at 123 rangi st, call cops, get bike back'

Knowing vaguely where the bike is is a HELL of a lot better than nothing, but needs to be coupled with more accurate info or some detective work.

Personally I think remotely activated air horn is the way to go!