Pagoda SL Group
W113 Pagoda SL Group => Electrical and Instruments => Topic started by: Brennie on July 06, 2024, 09:58:51
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Hi
Can anyone recommend an immobilising tracking alarm system that I can fit that is not too intrusive to the original wiring?
Or,can recommend someone in the UK that specialises in such things?
Thank you
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Brennie,
With an electric fuel pump, our cars are easily immobilized by a simple switch. My uncle, the PO of the car, had such a switch.
These days however I think the greatest threat (particularly in some high theft areas) would be simply towing or flat-bedding the Pagoda, not starting it and driving away.
In this case I think a dedicated tracking device is the answer.
https://www.trackershop-uk.com/car-trackers.html
https://www.guidingtech.com/best-car-trackers-uk/
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Dear Brennie
If you want the least intrusive system you can install, it would be to go for a new www.123ignition.com distributor with the embedded bluetooth immobilizer function. As you may know 123ignition distributors are from excellent quality made in Germany or some place like that. For my own cars I always change the original distributor for one of these electronic ones, since after 50 years of abuse the shaft and many mechanical distributor components can not be as precise as when they were new. Also because for a tip top ignition system that component is fundamental. I do not go anymore for conversion systems like the one from CRANE Or many others to update and aging distributor from points to electronic ignition.
Any alarm system would be intrusive to your original wiring harness. Installers always take the easiest route and dress their mess so that you think is a wonderful installation.
I do wiring harnesses reconstructions and upgrades as you may know. I do offer the service of installing embedded alarm systems into the main harness with a high level of craftsmanship, on which you can rest assure that system will do its thing for many many years to come.
So that will be one approach if you want your harness to be serviced and at the same time to have an alarm installed on it the best possible way. You can write me directly to give you more details on functionality.
There is also another approach for the tracking function which would be to buy in amazon one of the many plug in tracking devices with battery backup. Those systems are designed to have an intermittent battery supply and have a large lithium battery to keep working while is not energized. You can hide a system like that on the trunk and take energy from the trunk courtesy light or parking lights. Or you can install that battery backup GPS behind glove box and feed energy from glove box light switch which is energized all the time.
The reliability of any alarm system depends 40% on its inherent components quality and 60% on the craftsmanship and knowledge of the installer on your particular wiring harness.
It is easy to take signals at the ignition switch, but also burglars will look after that place if they found a protected car.
So keep in touch to decide which is the best approach for you.
Best regards
Eng.Leonardo Peterssen
Www.wiredoktor.com
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Here the distributor I was you all, telling about.
Minimal or cero modification to original harness.
https://123ignition.com/product/tuneplus-6-r-v-m/
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Yes… I had that in my last Pagoda.. how would that act as an immobilser? I don’t get it..
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There are some high end versions of that distributor that have bluetooth capabilities, and there is an app for your phone (iOs Or Android) that allows you to turn off or on the generation of spark.
Follow the link and read its capabilities .
Best regards
Eng.Leonardo Peterssen
Www.wiredoktor.com
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Colin Ferns had a Scorpion Alarm / tracker fitted in one of my cars when he restored it - it seems to work well
He will be able to provide more information
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The simplest and most cost effective GPS tracker is the Apple Air Tag. For less than U$50, you have a tracker that you hide somewhere in your car. No wiring. No changes to your original car. 24/7 GPS tracking on your phone should your car ever go missing. You know exactly where your car is and could call the police to go pick it up.
Every car should have one in my opinion so car thieves would not be tempted to take them in the first place knowing they are being tracked.
https://www.apple.com/au/airtag/
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Hi Brennie,
I have a tracker system on my Pagoda from Classic Tracker which has all the usual internet advantages but also has an immobilising app to use which I have linked to the fuel pump to switch off the fuel supply.
Get in touch with classic-tracker.com or ring 0208 265 0425 and speak to Nick the founder and mention my name.
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Thank you Ray
Will do first thing tomorrow…
Where are they based out of curiosity?
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The simplest and most cost effective GPS tracker is the Apple Air Tag. For less than U$50, you have a tracker that you hide somewhere in your car. No wiring. No changes to your original car. 24/7 GPS tracking on your phone should your car ever go missing. You know exactly where your car is and could call the police to go pick it up.
Every car should have one in my opinion so car thieves would not be tempted to take them in the first place knowing they are being tracked.
I agree in part and have one in my Pagoda, in addition to all of our luggage.
Here’s the rub. If your car is indeed stolen by a bad guy with an iPhone, the bad guy’s iPhone will let him know that he’s being tracked! I know this because when my car was being serviced by my mechanic friend, during his test driving he contacted me and said, “Do you have an AirTag in your car?” You see, his phone alerted him to that, and even mapped the route of his tracking! If he wanted he could have made the AirTag play a sound and he could have located it in the car.
See what HIS iPhone showed him in the attached.
Better than nothing as if set properly you’ll know when your Pagoda “leaves home”…
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Maybe you could hide the AirTag so that they may know it’s there but may never find it…
Just a thought…
The 123 Bluetooth ignition is a good option.. going to fit one anyway so,might as well get the one with the immobiliser ability.. but,it’s not an alarm or tracker…
Does anyone know who can fit them in the London area?
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Hi Brennie, I believe Colin Ferns can install the 123 - I think this is what he put in my restored Pagoda
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They will post the kit to you and they also have approved installers if you require that service. Have a look at there website.
Yes, Colin will install your 123 as he did mine 8 or 9 years ago. He is in Richmond.
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If he wanted he could have made the AirTag play a sound and he could have located it in the car.
To Michael's point, many people remove the speaker from their AirTag for this very reason
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsVz8FuZekg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsVz8FuZekg)
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I’m going to do that as a secondary precaution…
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Dear Friends:
AirTag from apple as substitute for GPS is not a good idea.
I am an Apple product fan since my teenager times. My first computer was an apple IIC, and after that many apple products. You name them, I have had my hands on all of them and I love their quality.
Nevertheless of being an apple advocate, if you read carefully the conditions under AIRTAG works, you will notice that it communicates to the world through a BACKGROUND or BACK DOOR, BLUETOOTH connection to any nearby mobile phone.
What would happen if the burglar who takes your classic car without authorization, has a phone with the bluetooth option turned off?
If a criminal wants to stole your car, he will for sure have the phone on airplane mode with all communication protocols turned off.
So under those circumstances you will have no idea where your car is.
AN APPLE AIRTAG is no substitute for a standalone GPS tracking device, specially if the tracking device has its own battery backup source.
That is my honest opinion.
I live in Venezuela as you may know, and here the cars are stollen every time. Not even a GPS tracking device is fully effective, but it is definitely better than having nothing.
Best regards
Eng.Leonardo Peterssen
Www.wiredoktor.com
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Dear Friends:
AirTag from apple as substitute for GPS is not a good idea.
I am an Apple product fan since my teenager times. My first computer was an apple IIC, and after that many apple products. You name them, I have had my hands on all of them and I love their quality.
Nevertheless of being an apple advocate, if you read carefully the conditions under AIRTAG works, you will notice that it communicates to the world through a BACKGROUND or BACK DOOR, BLUETOOTH connection to any nearby mobile phone.
What would happen if the burglar who takes your classic car without authorization, has a phone with the bluetooth option turned off?
If a criminal wants to stole your car, he will for sure have the phone on airplane mode with all communication protocols turned off.
So under those circumstances you will have no idea where your car is.
AN APPLE AIRTAG is no substitute for a standalone GPS tracking device, specially if the tracking device has its own battery backup source.
That is my honest opinion.
I live in Venezuela as you may know, and here the cars are stollen every time. Not even a GPS tracking device is fully effective, but it is definitely better than having nothing.
Best regards
Eng.Leonardo Peterssen
Www.wiredoktor.com
The AirTag will use any iPhone in the area, not just the phone of the thief. Its of course not bullet proof but cheap and better than nothing I think.
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Worth a try…
But.. I’d still like the name of a product that somebody has tried and tested…
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Expensive cars that are stolen in Europe get driven into a container. The closed container (Faraday cage… no GPS, 4G or AirTag communications possible) get shipped to a location (read: other country) where there is less oversight.
The container will be dropped there and watched for a while, e.g. until the car battery and any GPS batteries are dead. When the coast is clear, the car gets shipped to its final destination, or parted out.
Get a good mechanical steering lock, always park your car with the wheels angled towards the curb, and have a really loud alarm!
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The AirTag will use any iPhone in the area, not just the phone of the thief. Its of course not bullet proof but cheap and better than nothing I think.
Yes that's right. Any passing iPhone will work, if only briefly, and that's all you need for a location.
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With the utmost respect, parts of this story are unlikely and other parts inaccurate.
Surely not all stolen cars follow this pathway Peter, particularly W113’s.
Secondly, as Mike points out, Air tags only need a brief passing iPhone, just once, and they will locate the exact geolocation of where the car entered the container, or other such faraday cage. It is highly likely one of the car thief’s is carrying an iPhone, so voila, an exact location is mapped and tracked (last location seen).
The battery lasts for over a year in my experience, almost two, so it would need to be an incredibly patient thief to wait that long to offload the stolen goods.
Perhaps I am wrong, but given the thief has no idea that it is being tracked by a hidden Air tag, I have a high level of confidence I am not. I continue to strongly recommend every one has one in their Pagoda, what have you got to lose?
** I have no conflicts of interest with Apple, either stock or employment.
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Perhaps I am wrong, but given the thief has no idea that it is being tracked by a hidden Air tag ...
Here’s the rub. If your car is indeed stolen by a bad guy with an iPhone, the bad guy’s iPhone will let him know that he’s being tracked!
Bennie,
Did you find a satisfactory solution?
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Not yet.. I’m still investigating..
My friend has a hidden switch to his fuel pump.. not ideal.. he once drove a few blocks before remembered he hadn’t turned it on and the car stopped.. I remove the fuse when I leave for a long time.. 123 ignitions (top spec ones) have an immobiliser built into the phone app.. all thing to consider.. I still need the name of a good system the won’t be too intrusive to the wiring loom.. but,the AirTag will give a little piece of mind while I ponder..
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Hi Brennie,
Did you contact the tried and tested Classic Tracker, three other Pagoda owners that I know of are using the system.
You might want to check out ravelco.com for an anti theft cut out device which I also have fitted.
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Hi Ray..
Thank you for that information.. I’m looking at it right now.. the Ravelco.. where is your mounted, and,did they have to hack into the wiring in any real way… do you have any pictures for me? And.. who did the fitting?
So many questions..
B
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I started looking into airtags after reading this thread (and Artkez's one where he recovered his stolen car in LA)...
Came across this company which makes some great products, in case they are of any use to others. The TimeCapsule in particular looks great.
https://www.elevationlab.com/products/tagvault-magnetic
https://www.elevationlab.com/products/timecapsule
Rahul
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This is brilliant Rahul, great find. I will be ordering several of the time capsules for my cars and my travel luggage to track where my bags are when I am flying.
For $40 you get 10 years of GPS tracking linked directly to your iPhone seamlessly. That’s $4 per year to save worry about your car or valuables disappearing forever.
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I am not sure, perhaps I am reading it wrong - it is an airtag, has nothing to do with GPS... for those with GPS tracking, they need to find themselves by GPS coordinates and report its position. You need subscription or a lifetime subscription to get to network.
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Those two products that #Rahul has noted are as follows:
1. TagVault-Magnetic is a device designed to magnetically hold an AirTag onto anything steel.
2. TimeCapsule is basically a battery device that replaces the button battery in the AirTag, which lasts maybe a year, with two much higher capacity AA batteries providing longer life.
Neither of these devices do anything without an Apple AirTag. An Apple AirTag is a tracking device that ONLY works for you if YOU have an iPhone or iPad or Apple Macintosh. If you don't have any of these Apple devices, an AirTag is of no use for you. In that case you'd need an Android equivalent or something similar that works with your smart device operating system.
Though I'm not familiar with the Android or other equivalents, I do have four AirTags employed. Three are in luggage, and one on the Pagoda. They report the location back to my iPhone via the Apple app "FIND MY", the same app that tracks your family and friends when they allow it, as well as all your Apple devices when set up to do so. Mine tracks all my Apple devices (computers, iPads, phones); my immediate family members, and my four AirTags.
As mentioned in other threads, the AirTags work by "finding" any Apple device connected to the internet, and reporting their location through that device back to you via the FIND MY app. To prevent "stalking" if the AirTag moves with an unknown Apple device, the AirTag will notify that device that they are being followed by an AirTag. It does not report every connection to every Apple device.
Thus, when the AirTag is in luggage, as soon as passengers on the plane and or ramp workers at the airport come close to the luggage, the AirTag location is reported back to me. If the Pagoda is parked somewhere, say at a car show, it will report back upon request any connection to a passerby with an iPhone, but will not notify the owner of that iPhone. If a stranger (or thief!) with an iPhone takes the Pagoda, after some period of time it will notify them that they are being tracked by an AirTag.
Hardly a perfect anti-theft device, but quite useful when I bought all four AirTags for USD $99--
A true standalone GPS tracker will require a much costlier investment as well as subscription fees.
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"If a stranger (or thief!) with an iPhone takes the Pagoda, after some period of time it will notify them that they are being tracked by an AirTag."
Mike makes a good point about the notification to the thief (and as of now even their Android device would warn them), but the speaker can /should be disabled as per a previous post making locating the physical AirTag really hard. (Just to clarify further here, the thief does not need to have an iPhone/iOS to enable actual tracking, any iOS device in the vicinity or passing by will anonymously report it.)
The iPhone is the most popular format in the US, by a large margin in many demographics. Android phones can now also locate AirTags via an app, and I understood Apple and Google are working together to integrate their tracking device protocols such that both iOS and Android phones will anonymously report in any detected tracking devices they pass, including AirTags - this may already have been released. That should substantially increase the reporting density, especially outside the US.
I believe that AirTag is now likely the preferred and more robust tracking option. I keep a vehicle in an underground garage in London and there is no GPS signal there, so the traditional GPS tracker was useless and a simply a battery drain. I switched to an AirTag and it now regularly and reliably updates its location. An AirTag is also much more discrete and can be buried away (and the speaker deactivated if wanted) - versus the bulkier, more obvious GPS tracker.
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I believe that AirTag is now likely the preferred and more robust tracking option. I keep a vehicle in an underground garage in London and there is no GPS signal there, so the traditional GPS tracker was useless and a simply a battery drain. I switched to an AirTag and it now regularly and reliably updates its location. An AirTag is also much more discrete and can be buried away (and the speaker deactivated if wanted) - versus the bulkier, more obvious GPS tracker.
Well, but they will leave that garage... then you see it. Regardless of coming across any IOS devices, somewhere in the countryside where they'd probably stash it for some time.
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I wonder if this might be a European/Germany thing.
My car came from (Immenstaad) Germany and it came with the steering wheel lock plus a hidden switch to shut off the ability to start (will just crank and crank) as well as a well hidden switch shutting the fuel pump so it would only run for about a block's distance
Made it sound like cars being stolen was a common occurrence
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I wonder if this might be a European/Germany thing.
While we certainly have our hotspots of car theft in the USA, (I don't know where these are but they are not where I live), we DO NOT have the equivalent of "Eastern Europe" which is a polite way of saying countries in general that cannot be trusted without specifically naming them.
Here in the USA, it is far more likely that your Hyundai or Kia will be stolen (because the inherent built in safety mechanism is so poorly engineered) and taken for a joyride, or your CAT will be stolen off your Toyota, or the airbags off a Honda.
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Michael, not speaking due to "local patriotism" or hurt pride - you may be right from many angles...
But it is pretty much the same here and in the western Europe as you described - most cars stolen are the popular modern cars. Cats is the fashion started 4-5 years ago. I think the patterns are the same. You would have to look at statistics to determine where the car theft is more intense.
I think your view is a bit biased by 90ies and early 2000. Those years car theft was driven by exports further east, which is minimum now. The crime rates went dramatically down since those days.
Having said that, classic car theft happens, we see reports. It is more frequently coming form Germany (well, I do not know what the rate would be per 100 cars existing). For here (Poland) I cannot recall over last 4-5 years anybody had a classic car stolen. I t is rather rare, it is not something that would make me lose my sleep, but it happens. Sort of: low probability high impact case. As much as modern cars are equipped with modern anti-theft means (including spare parts coding), our cars are not. That is why I threw in a GPS tracker into my car, for this low probability event.
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Not to be misunderstood, my point/posting was not to single out an area or Country of potential theft but rather to note the diligence of owners in a particular area in care for their classics
jb
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John, my mistake, I was going to write:
"Michael, not speaking due to "local patriotism" or hurt pride - you may be right from many angles..."
All is perfectly fine!
Now thinking about it... As for myself and probably a lot of people of my age, when you had your first cars (which were not easy to obtain) in the 80ies and 90ies and going through our "Wild East" in the 90ies were mafias were common and crime rates of some sorts going through the roof, we really were losing sleep over our cars being stolen, it was common. I had a new Volvo stolen in 2001 (company car, fortunately) in a very tricky way.
Maybe that us why we are overprotective here.
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... to be clear, as soon as the thief looks on their iPhone and notes they are being tracked it is too late - that iPhone has likely already reported back the AirTag location anonymously. And, again, it is now Android as well as iOS devices that report on AirTag locations.
For regions where I expect almost all of us are, it is essentially impossible now to find a 'Find My' desert where a car can go to to be stashed out of range of any iOS/Android device.
That the thief knows they are being tracked is ok - it not that easy to find a well hidden AirTag. The longer they wave their iPhone around looking for the AirTag, the more their location gets reported. Doubtless thieves are similarly well aware of tracking with the traditional GPS tracker equipped car (likely is even labeled as such): it is lot, lot easier to block GPS signals (cf my underground parking in London).
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... to be clear, as soon as the thief looks on their iPhone and notes they are being tracked it is too late - that iPhone has likely already reported back the AirTag location anonymously...it is essentially impossible now to find a 'Find My' desert where a car can go to to be stashed out of range of any iOS/Android device...
Oh, so right you are Charles! My mechanic friend was the one who, two days after he had my car, asked ME if there was an AirTag in the car. His iPhone was telling him that he was being followed, but ONLY when HE was driving my car. When he parked it, he is no longer being followed. I could see the entire thing, and I knew where my car was at all times. So, yes this very simple device, all of $29, is well worth it. I didn't get my AirTags specifically for my car but rather for my luggage when doing air travel. But I bought a three pack--and threw one in the Pagoda.
My daily drivers are all Fords. They have, without any subscription fee, or any added tracker, or anything else, built in tracking that reports its location nearly constantly to my Ford app on my phone. It would be very hard to start the car without one of the two factory fobs, but it could be stolen by flatbed I suppose. But I'd always know where it is and could follow law enforcement to its location. I would imagine most modern cars are similar.