The Singletrack office was broken into in the early hours of Saturday. We’ve lost four test bikes.

The story on the front page has full details of bikes, with specs and pictures.

Please keep your eyes peeled for the bikes, any parts, or any other info that might be useful. One day somebody will get lucky and catch the thieving scumbags that are doing this – we hope it might be us so we can wee in their shoes/own them with Bombers, etc.

Some pretty distinctive frames there. Fingers crossed they try and sell them whole and get caught.

Some nice bikes there, seems as if nice bikes are being nicked to order now, either followed home or watched.

Surely you’d ban them from the forum… :d

Some nice bikes there, seems as if nice bikes are being nicked to order now, either followed home or watched.

With the ST address being published there’s no real need for following…. best they can do is just make it as difficult as possible with security devices.

Many normal riders show off where their pride and joy live all over the internet too. E.g. Photos with obvious landmarks or publishing their rides. Strava has a privacy setting for hiding the start/finish of a route within half a km of your house but many don’t realise. Not sure about other online mapping….?

Sorry to hear this. Are the Police being helpful?

Sorry to hear this, Fresh Goods Fridays notifies us as well as the thieves what lovely bikes you have on the premises.

If iPads and mobile phones have apps for locating them if stolen is there a small enough device out there that can do the same job for items of greater worth? That can put out a signal from within a metal or carbon cage…

E.g. Photos with obvious landmarks

Or photos taken by smartphones that are automatically geotagged with your exact GPS location!

is there a small enough device out there that can do the same job for items of greater worth?

Yeah there have been a few attempts at this – the main issue is power. You need a device that can remain in some kind of very low power sleep state for months/years then be woken up remotely and start broadcasting its location.

Cuberider, the police have been very helpful.

If cycle speed thingys can do it then probably gps tracker to same low power state can last a month or so to track an item so great that of a push bike lol.

If cycle speed thingys can do it then probably gps tracker to same low power state can last a month or so to track an item so great that of a push bike lol.

Words order sense make please

Ahh I see, you are a teatotallar whom speaks alien. Best get off the wagonsphere and head on down to the blue and green planet to drain the quality resources which are hops/ wheat and barley ;D

Data tag is available now, surely the importers should be encouraged to fit them to all their press fleet?

DataTag doesn’t let you track bikes or anything (in the manner that TPTcruiser was suggesting) – it is just a passive transponder that gives out a unique number when scanned.

It may help the police to return recovered stolen bikes to their rightful owners, but that’s about it.

(still got no idea what onceinalifetime was on about: “cycle speed thingys”? “track an item so great that of a push bike”??)

Ahha my language skills are required here then

As a cycle computer is capable of being powered for a long time on a battery including long periods in sleep mode/standby then surely we can achieve the same thing with a GPS unit with transmitter and use this to track cycles over time and distance

Junkyard Fluent in gibberish since he met the Internet

Junkyard understood so maybe the two crackheada above may want to lay off the pipe aye.

It is possible that is what I was implying or stating.

Anyway hope they find the crims repsonsible and do what I would if dealing with it.

Thanks Junkyard!

Few flaws with that logic. A cycle computer is basically little more than a digital watch, so it can run on a button battery for years and years.

Whereas a tracker would have very different power requirements. Even in a sleep state it would still need to regularly connect to some kind of network to see if it needed to wake up, so would need a transceiver, antenna and enough power to connect to the nearest cell tower.

State of the art commercial units looks like this:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICb4g0fcBqY[/video]
http://traqm.com/eye-trac-911-personal-tracker/

And the battery lasts for “up to” 40 days.

Still possible, but hard to conceal on a bike and would require regular recharging.

Junkyard understood so maybe the two crackheada above may want to lay off the pipe aye

I can assure you young man that I do not partake of any “pipe”, cracked or otherwise.

And I’m still not entirely clear what “to track an item so great that of a push bike lol” means? 😕

Junkyard understood

For most people this is not a badge of pride

There is a GPS tracker available for bikes. Pegasus make it, there is a writeup on it and you can buy it here.

I have heard that the GPS location isn’t super accurate, so the TV version of “it’s in that blue van” is wishful thinking. And the $150 cost might be too high for ST to do a fleet bikes if they have 10 or 12 at any given time. I’m sure that the device could be removed or disabled somehow, too.

There is a GPS tracker available for bikes. Pegasus make it, there is a writeup on it and you can buy it here.

I have heard that the GPS location isn’t super accurate, so the TV version of “it’s in that blue van” is wishful thinking. And the $150 cost might be too high for ST to do a fleet bikes if they have 10 or 12 at any given time. I’m sure that the device could be removed or disabled somehow, too.

I use this type of product on a daily basis. Believe me, if you think that the thieves near you are likely to hide your bike in a forest or an open field then they’re worth a punt. If however, you live in a relatively populated area you need to spend more than a grand to stand a chance of locating your bike. Plus £200 a year licence, plus £800 to track it with an RF device. Even then it isn’t always a given.

Just saying like.

Just had mine stolen in the early hours of this morning, Keighley Police also helpful with us as well but I’m not really holding out too much hope. Had just finished building it up at the weekend, never even had the chance to ride it yet – was saving that for later today.

🙁 – a new low has been reached. Waiting until a bike is just built up 🙁

Do you guys at stw towers not have an alarm/CCTV after the last break in?.

Yes, we have both.

It’s because of the alarm that the police arrived in 10 minutes and disturbed the thieves. The CCTV coverage didn’t catch faces as they kept the lights off and used torches. The ir part of the CCTV didn’t work very well. We have there’d a better system.

Which other break in are you referring to?

Sorry, must by my mistook! Thought you had one previously?.

Get a ‘smart water’ systerm installed, & fill it with sulphuric acid.

Just DON’T set it off accidently… 😉

What GPS tracker do KitKat put in their packets?

What the GPS tracker that Nestle are putting in their packets of KitKats that there using for their new promotion or is it a load of b******s

just dont leave bikes at the office, would be the smart solution, really sorry for the lose, maybe rent some secure storage away from the office and keep in QT

chunkymonkey – Member
Just had mine stolen in the early hours of this morning, Keighley Police also helpful with us as well but I’m not really holding out too much hope. Had just finished building it up at the weekend, never even had the chance to ride it yet – was saving that for later today.

Sounds like there is a bit of a spate in the area. A friend has just had 2 bikes taken from Saltaire (Blue Orange 5 with fox 36s and a white/blue lapierre zesty, incase anyone sees them about).

I’m a product design engineer and am entering a competition with uni at the moment into designing a deterrent device for thieves, to hopefully prevent as many bikes being stolen. We are at the very early stages of development right now and would really appreciate it if any of you guys would fill out this survey to help us get a better idea about what are potential problems with existing locks etc.

It only takes a few minutes, I promise!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YC9BX2X

The law has just been clarified allowing extreme violence to be served to the burglers if it is in the heat of the moment and in defence of you and your property.

Ken Clarke says “We will make it quite clear you can hit the burglar with the poker if he’s in the house and you have a perfect defence when you do so.”
I say get a bat so that you can defend yourself when the next scumbag tries to break in 😈

I am not an engineer so don’t know if this is technically possible but…

Have a small, low power using device you fit to the bike.
Have a larger more power hungry device you keep in your pocket when riding or hidden in the garage when stored.
If the little device and the big device are more than a couple of metre apart the big device triggers an alarm or the little device triggers a small nuclear explosion that destroys the bike and anyone too close to it.

I am guessing that because the two devices only need to communicate over short distances and don’t need the whole GPS bit the power drain would be lower.

WCA Maybe RFID is what your looking for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification

Have a detector around your garage/shed door and if you don’t disable it before the bike passes through an alarm goes off. Obviously the associated lasers and guns will all pop up too.

Big warehouses have this sort of system so when a pallet of boxes is loaded/unloaded onto a lorry the sensor ring detects every box on the pallet so they don’t need to be scanned individually. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much to change it from a data logging system to an alarm. Might cost more than a new bike tho…

rfid – that’s the baby. They are fairly cheap as I understood it. The reader / sensor wouldn’t need to be clever so could be cheap. Just need a power source for the TNT charge under the saddle.

I don’t think you need a TNT charge and besides it would trash your bike and you would still need a new one.

What you do is have a separate post and saddle on the bike when you store it. There could be a micro switch triggered by the RFID that releases a pin. Next time the saddle is sat on a spring powered spike is released from inside the post, this will be powerful enough to penetrate the saddle and well whatever is on the saddle. 😯 😛

nice plan, apart from the fact that the device you just came up with is a man trap. laws were passed in the 1800s to stop that sort of thing…

Laws permit bike theft that doesn’t stop the ****.

And besides didn’t Cameron just say we are allowed to beat burglars to death? This isn’t quite so severe and just delayed a bit. It also doesn’t risk your own health. Well unless you forget to remove the post when you go for a ride.

B*****ds. Hope you catch ’em pronto.