As much as alarms improve the safety of your motorcycle they can break down and also they get affected by the mobile phone masts and transmitters or for that matter anything that operates on the same frequency. On our Swiss tour 2007 we had three bikes immobilized at the same time and they all were fitted with the Datatool system 3 alarms. To resolve the problem the bikes had to be pushed about 300 m from the mast, let to cool down and then restarted. It was not a big problem if you were aware of this problem, but in this instance none of our clients (except us) ever heard of such a problem and they were all convinced that was the end of their holidays. Upon our return to the UK one of them (Roger Pike - Bristol) contacted Datatool and the following is the extract from their e-mail response:

"The problem you experienced is something we are aware of, basically the root of the problem is there are only two FM frequencies that can be transmitted on without a license in the UK, they are 418MHz and 433MHz. Until the late 90's we and everyone else were only able to use 418 which was very heavily used and the problems you experienced in Switzerland were occurring to our alarms in the UK at certain petrol stations and near other transmitters. When we released to Veto Evo we were allowed to start using 433MHz, this cured the transmitter block problems in the UK but starting causing problems for people using their bikes in Europe."

"The only option available to us was to continue using 433MHz as it is the better of the two in the UK and add a PIN override function to the alarm. This means when people did suffer this problem they were still able to disarm their alarm and start their bike without pushing it 300m (Goldwing owners understandably don't see the pushing option as a viable one). It also means that if there is a problem with or you loose your transmitters you are not left stranded."

As we personally learned all this the hard way, twice (once in France and once in Czech Republic) we do not bother anymore with the alarms. It makes only about £5 difference to our insurance premium.