Hi, Earlier I asked if anyone had experience of the Astrodon system. No one offered any good or bad feed back, so I took the risk and splashed out on one. I ordered the alarm plus the remote pager option. [URL]http://www.astrodonalarms.com/[/URL] I have just finished installing it and I thought you might be interested in the results..... The unit comes with two remotes, the main alarm unit, a speaker and the actual sounder. No tyraps, no cable joints and very poor instructions for its installation. Connections are as follows:- Battery +ve plus 2x grounds, immobiliser pair, starter solenoid, ignition on sense combined with an ignition system feed (so the bike can be remote started). The alarm can be set off by one of two methods... 1. If the alarm senses a sharp vibration, though it does ignore the low frequency stuff. 2. If the alarm senses the ignition supply come on via either the key, or someone trying to bypass the ignition lock. The vibration sensor is extremely sensitive, detecting even the very slightest of contacts with the bike. Just tapping a finger nail against the body triggers the voice warning. Continued tapping after the voice warning has finished then triggers the main alarm sounder. If an attempt is made to bypass the ignition, then the main alarm triggers straight away. It does seem to be pretty immune to the rumble of passing traffic even on its most sensitive setting. Both the speaker and the noise from the alarm sounder are extremely loud. Painful at close range. The system also uses a rolling code on the remote to prevent it being scanned. It has to be manually armed with the remote, not automatic arming when you turn the ignition off. It also lacks an alarmed warning LED and the remotes are much bigger than most, including a tiny telescopic antenna to extend its range. This is supposed to be about 200m and I have no reason to doubt this. If the complete unit is fully wired, the bike can be both started remotely and stopped if it is hijacked. Remote starting turns the ignition on, the alarm off and fires the starter solenoid for a few seconds. The way I have wired it it does not try to start the engine if it is in gear. Another button on the remote triggers the indicators into flashing and several pulse on the alarm to allow you to find the bike in a busy car park. So considering the low cost, I am quite impressed with the basic alarm unit. I am less than impressed with the remote pager... The instructions suggested the transmitter be connected across the alarm sounder. Doing this the level of noise from the sounder decreased markedly and the pager failed to be triggered at all. Trying the transmitter directly across the battery it only faired slightly better, triggering the pager very rarely at close range. My assumption is that this part of the kit must be faulty and I have asked the supplier for a replacement. I would guess the pager is quite heavy on batteries, because it can be powered from a wall wart.
