Tucked away at the far end of this year’s Eurobike show was a small booth named Faharradgager, which translates to ‘Bicycle Hunter’.
Like many new products, it is a combination of web enabled software and hardware. The small alarm and tracking device attaches to bottle cage mounts on any standard bike frame.
It has a small motor inside that locks and unlocks in into place via the smartphone app. So there’s no key or combination lock on the device itself.
Although the device is visible to potential bike thieves, because it attaches so tightly and close to the frame, it cannot be prized off without wrecking the bike frame, which defeats the purpose of stealing the bike. At best, with a lower value steel frame, the frame would end up scratched and or dented by time the device was levered off.
Bicycle Hunter has a couple of security features. Firstly, if the bike is stolen, which is detected by sudden movement of the bike when the alarm is turned on, it will emit a 90 decibel audio alarm.
That alarm will only run for 20 minutes then turn off so as not to flatten the battery.
You then search for the bike using the smartphone app. If you get within about 100 metres of the bike, two things happen. The alarm goes back on, so that you can hear where the bike is and your app alerts you that it has found the bike.
The battery will last one year in normal use, but if the bike is stolen, after the alarm turns off, the battery has about one month’s life left depending upon how many times the alarm goes off during which time you need to track down the bike.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do the tracking all yourself. If anyone else in your city has a Bike Hunter app and goes within 100 metres of your stolen bike, it will alert their device and then advise the bike’s location to its owner automatically via the app. So the more units are sold, the more effective the security network will become.
Bike Hunter will cost about 80 Euros (A$116). It will be available in iPhone and Android versions and will be launching early 2017 in Germany with hopefully other countries to follow.
