re viper car alarms in article c fr cdo cs uiuc edu u cs uiuc edu ronald e garnett writes hello auto enthusiasts i recently had more car mangled broken into and decided to get an alarm installed it s a viper and has a shock sensor sensors for each door ignition cutoff and automatic door locks i have this same alarm installed in my syclone it works great the shock sensor is very sensitive but much more practical than the motion sensor i have on my other car it doesn t trigger if the car is rocked gently by the wind but any kind of shock sets it off even kicking the tire sets it off it works great what worries me is the hood and hatch if someone could pry them up gently enough then they could bypass the alarm the shock sensor is adjustable and there are two cycles on it you can adjust it to be sensitive enough that there is no way you could open the hood without setting off the alarm although i know that you cannot pop the hood on the syclone without setting off my alarm now and yet i have had zero none false alarms with this system the alarm tells you when you disarm it whether it has been activated in your absence i have been able to trace every alarm to it s cause and it was not a false alarm i m also wondering how easy it would be for a thief to crawl underneath the car and cut the battery cable to disable the alarm i guess it would be possible depending on the vehicle my syclone is so tight in the engine compartment that it would be tough to do this there are supplemental power supplies you can put on with this viper alarm but i don t have one i really think that if someone wants my car that bad the alarm won t keep them from it even with a supplemental power supply viper also sells some fancy field disturbance sensor that supposedly detects people approcahing the car this is primarily for convertibles i have a convertible and have looked at this feature in detail alpine actually makes a better radar unit if you want to get one of these it has zones in it that can be shut down independently so that if one side of your car has pedestrian traffic or something else that would trigger an alarm it shuts down the zone or rather pulls it in tighter i don t see the real benefit to these unless you have a convertible that you leave the top down on avoid the voice alarm that can be added to the radar package it talks to people as they walk by i saw one installed on a lotus esprit the kids would taunt it seeing how close they could get before it warned them to get back the owner finally disabled it which defeats the purpose in my mind i m interested in the opinions of you netters about these problems and about the viper in general i am real happy with my viper one other feature i really like is you can tune it to your preferences you can have it arm passively or not you can disable the chirp for arming disarming you can have it lock unlock the doors when the alarm is armed disarmed i like these features i hate the chirp when the alarm arms disarms so mine flashes the lights only i like the door lock feature although i have to be careful to take my keys with me because it doesn t know if you have left your keys in the car when it passively arms and locks the doors but if you are meticulous about taking your keys with you it takes care of the rest the car is an ford probe gt that used to be in great shape ron garnett i looked seriously at the alpine system too it is a real nice system but more money and it has a motion sensor standard instead of the shock sensor the shock sensor is better and the viper shock sensor is better cycle than the optional alpine one imho i think the viper gives you a lot of good value for the money but it isn t absolutely tamperproof no system is except maybe the one that james bond had on his lotus in for your eyes only anyone know where we can get one of those installed maybe that was what they had in the van in the world trade center huh merrill
