I feel the urge to apologise to NavalArchitect. My country has produced world class thieving scum for many hundreds of years. Our leaders have tried hanging them, deporting them, sending them to Disneyland, giving them free money and many other things and still very little changes. No single device, electronic or mechanical will defeat them. They have daily experience of technology most of us can barely imagine being defeated.

The solution is the layered defence.

Simply do not leave a vehicle in locations the scum inhabit if you can avoid it. The estates are obvious as people who are so low as to steal aren't going to bother clearing up their burnt out cars and chip wrappers, but any decent area between the chav holes and benefit offices can be more dangerous. If the locals use huge chains and own Rottweilers you want your stuff behind the wire too.

If these low lifes were anything except lazy they would not steal they would get a job. An unknown and invisible bike under a tatty cover parked next to a nice new Ducati/BMW/Harley registers less. A bike with a 16mm link chain through the swing arm and into the street furniture many of our local councils have been forced to provide leads them to conclude that the walk to get their stash of plumbers nitrogen and angle grinder is time better spent mugging old ladies. When the owner has taken the trouble to park where there is functional CCTV and has used a marking system like Smartwater or Datatag this enforces the idea that if they get caught and have done enough crime to register above the police "it's only property" limit, their eventual sentence will be long enough for their girlfriend to start having chavlets with someone else. Alarms and immobilisers do very little as only the owner or people who know him will respond. Trackers are more of a worry in the first few minutes of the theft the owner may pop up and prove to be big baseball fan. There is then a gap in which they will just remove them. The final defence is unfortunately to simply have sufficient back up, be it insurance or cash to carry on afterwards.

This is all much tougher for the traveller. My bikes live in a concrete and steel garage, chained to the floor with 3-5 Kg chains, are covered by a house alarm my neighbours will respond to and have both security markings and insurance. I know which parts of many UK cities I simply would not leave a bike in.

The only advice I can give is to carry the heaviest, highest rated security chain you can and use it, through street furniture if possible. Look for hotels with underground car parks and security barriers in city centres or at least get the bike onto out of sight private property. If you have electronics that can disable the bike you need to know how to fix it, so CAN systems need an OBD reader, hard wired need diagrams etc.

I'm sorry if this puts anyone off. The UK is mostly safe and absolutely fine, in 20 years I have had two attempted thefts. One at Maggot services in South Wales the other in Central London. I think people should however take note that there is no easy, light, flick a switch solution.

Andy