Is This The Ultimate In Bike Security? The Knog Scout Cycle Alarm & Tracker

Is This The Ultimate In Bike Security? The Knog Scout Cycle Alarm & Tracker

This is the latest bit of tech from Knog. It has an 85 decibel alarm, upto 6 months battery life, only weighs just 22g, and will find your bike if someone steals it …….. Does it really work, and can it really help me find a stolen bike? Well, lets put it to the test.

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*Affiliate links to products and tools used and discussed in this video*
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👇The Knog Scout – Get yours here👇:
https://amzn.to/3vjJGTx

Knog Website:
https://www.knog.com

*The Lake District cyclist:*
https://www.youtube.com/@UC6psnAR010VZJN6cmaywLrw

*Chapters:*
00:00 – Intro
00:25 – How I found It
01:25 – What Is The Knog Scout
02:45 – Alarm Overview
03:28 – Tracker Overview
03:53 – Fitting It
05:45 – Alarm Functions
07:38 – Testing The Alarm Outside
09:10 – Tracker Functions
11:10 – Tracker Testing
10:03 – Conclusion

*About Ribble Valley Cyclist:*
I am a regular road cyclist based in the North West of England. I have been a cyclist my whole life, and try to get out every day. The purpose of my YouTube channel is to share the knowledge I’ve built up in my 40 years as a cyclist.

Follow me on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/ribblevalley_cyclist/

Follow me on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ribblevalleycyclist

See my routes on Komoot:
https://www.komoot.com/user/1849909422730

Follow me on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@ribblevalleycyclist

Email me:
ribblevalleycyclist@gmail.com

This little Gadget is the latest bit of tech from nog it has an 85 DB alarm up to 6 months battery life only weighs 22 G and will help you find your bike if someone steals it but does it really work can it really help me find a bike

If someone steals it well let’s put it to the test I recently went to a trade show here in the UK Manchester V all very EX exting had a whole video planned for the day pie the camera in the car with me driving there telling you everything we can expect from the show

Slow motion footage of riders riding around the Vel drone and then me walking around the show showing you all the latest goodies but if I’m honest the whole thing was a little bit underwhelming don’t get me wrong there were some fantastic Brands being represented and some really good

Products on display but nothing new groundbreaking or exciting yes Shimano was there showing off their Duro Ace Delights as were Park tour with their blue handle Beauties but nothing you’ve not seen before or may already even own I was around the show in no time I think

I spent more time getting there than I did being there was that saying cyc is love to come out with no you’re stuck in traffic you are traffic as a matter of fact want to think about it I know I did so there I was heading for the door when

I passed my last stand nog now I’m a big nog fan I’ve been using their products for years I bought my first nog lights 9 years ago and I’m still using them today so I popped over for a check I didn’t expect to see anything revolutionary just some really good quality bike

Lights but then Colin showed me this the Scout bike alarm and finder it’s a small lightweight bike alarm that utilizes the Apple find me network but you don’t need an air tag he moved the bike in front of him and it gave off an ear pce piing

Screech and his mobile phone lit up like a Christmas tree now that is the sort of thing I went to the show for so what is a scout well it is an 85 DB alarm a bike locator which I will be testing has a battery life of up to 6 months which is

Rechargeable via USB it only weighs 22 G and a waterproof rating of ip66 so it’s fundamentally two things a bike alarm to let you know that somebody may be trying to steal your bike and a Tracker if they do so let’s look at those two things in a little more detail

First up the bike alarm you’re out in your bike and you pull in to your favorite Cafe and using something like this you do the best you possibly can to secure your bike in you go and ceue for your food and what should could be going

Through your mind is H shall I have the beans on toast or the bacon butty but what’s actually going through your mind is is my bike all right does anyone touch my bike I can’t see my bike they could just cut that thing with a pair of

Wire cutters the Scout has a motion activated alarm via a gyroscopic chip if someone touched your bike and you’ve got one of these you’ll know about it so what about the whole bike locator part well the Scout uses Apple’s find my technology which Apple made open source

Not long ago so this means trusted Brands like nog can utilize Apple’s find m without the user having to spend money on an air tag let’s fit it to a bike this is the bike I’m going to be fitting the Scout to my own personal pride and joy my summer bike

The only thing that remains of the original bike is the frame the forks the seat post and the handlebars and these are my pinell most Jaguar 3K carbon handlebars that have been sat on a shelf behind the camera for 6 months waiting for me to find some

Time to fit them to my pride and joy so to the chap who commented on one of my videos the other day saying I’ve got too much time on my hands oh you think so do you so nog has designed the Scout to be mounted on your frame on a bottle cage

Mount either a disused bottle cage Mount or sandwiched between the bottle cage and the frame which is the option I’m going to go for and I’m going to be mounting mine on the seat tube because my logic is I use that cage the least so there’s less chance of me spilling drink

On it and I also believe that it might be easier to get to the charge port when it’s there like that as opposed to being tucked down there now the kit comes with antier screws so the bad guy can’t easily remove it but anti-tamper screws need an anti-tamper tool so make sure

You put that somewhere safe don’t lose it and one final point it comes with this little brightly colored silicon boot that will give your scout a little more protection but it will also add as an advertising thing to show people that you are using one of these right I’ll

Get this Stuck on Me bike so there you go that’s my one f a really simple job to do is I didn’t bother filming there’s no point it’s there and with this particular bike with the black on black you’d hardly know it was there very discreet indeed let’s look at the alarm

Function first what I’ve done is I’ve raised the bike off of the ground a little bit just so you can see what I’m doing it’s not a massively tall bike okay so as mentioned previously the system comes with a companion app and you can can use this for functions like

Checking battery level connectivity firmware version but what you can also do is you can adjust the sensitivity of the alarm as well as adjusting how the alarm notifies you with regards to volumes notification sound types such and so forth and another great little function is you can disable the audio on

The alarm itself and what this basically means in the event that the alarm is activated it will notify you to your phone but the bike itself won’t make a sound you arm or disarm the alarm either via the companion app or you can also do it directly from the

Unit obviously to be able to do it directly from the unit your phone needs to be in very close proximity of the bike I think it’s something like a meter or a meter and a half okay so let’s activate the alarm again and give it a quick test so the alarm

Will give a polite little chir if it’s given a slight nudge like that but if it’s given a large movement then you’ll get a full alarm activation that is your full 85 DB from the bike as well as a screaming alarm to your mobile phone it’s really loud so so the NOG

Scout sounds very loud in my workshop with its low roof but how does it sound in the real world well let’s go and give it a try glorious sunny day maybe we can say that spring is here dare we say it right okay so according to my iPhone my

Bike which is just over there I’m not sure if you can see it is roughly 100 ft away and I’m currently connected to it so let’s see if we can arm and dis arm the alarm armed and disarmed so we can activate and deactivate in okay I would admit it

Is a perfect environment because it’s a nice clear day it’s direct line of sight but we can activate and deactivate the alarm within 100t right so now let’s see let’s go and activate the alarm set it off and then come back over here and see

How loud it is right let’s switch it on and I’ll go and set it off okay so back at the bike let’s set the alarm off and then go back to that bench over there which is roughly 100t away and see if we can hear it from over there so first of

All let’s set it off right let me clear the notification off my phone right and there we are 100t away from it and I can still hear it and yeah it is quite quite annoying so yeah outside obviously it’s not as loud as you would have indoors but yes still loud enough

To be very annoying right so now let’s have a look at the really clever bit the finder so as I was saying earlier the Scout uses the Apple find M Network in a similar way to an air tag by communicating with other Apple devices it interacts with

And rep supporting its location the only difference between the Scout and an air tag is an air tag also has the ultrawide bandwidth and what this basically means is once you are on almost on top of the air tag you can use your mobile phone as a compass to fine-tune and locate where

The device is but at the end of the day this is a bike not a set of car keys so I don’t see that as being a big issue and additionally you can use the chirp function within find my or the alarm function within the NOG app to activate

The alarm and then you’ll hear it and I think the only way we can truly test if this technology works is to let somebody steal this bike so what I will do is I will let them steal it give them a 30 minute Head Start and then we will use

This technology to see if we can recover the bike okay so the rules the bike Thief is given a 30 minute Head Start and they’re allowed to use their car they can go off in any direction I genuinely have no idea where they’re going to go now this particular bike

Thief has got an iPhone so they’re going to have to turn their Bluetooth off otherwise that would give this device an unfair Advantage now I know what car this bike Thief drives so their final place needs to be out of sight of their car otherwise I just recognize it

Wouldn’t I now the alarm on the bike will go apparently for 30 minutes I’ve not tried it it’s just too painful on the ears it will go for 30 minutes and we can’t really expect our volunteer bike Thief to put up with an alarm for 30 minutes so we are going to deactivate

The siren on the bike right I’m in the car and the bike stealing baddy has got a 30 minute head start on me now I genuinely have no idea where they’ve gone I don’t even know whether they turned left or right when they set off I

Haven’t got a clue but also I’ve not actually tested this yet so I have no idea if this technology is going to work so I’ve got my phone let’s unlock it and open the NOG app and red button at the bottom will open Apple’s find my there you go and it is

Saying it’s in a place called bridg end so what I then do is I click on the device click on directions and it has now loaded Apple’s navigation so let’s click go starting route and it’s saying go to the top of the road and turn left right

So let’s go right so it turns out that our battery hasn’t gone that far according to this it’s 1.2 miles of a mile so the camera I’m using today is a new one I have ditched the GoPro I got bored of all the GoPro problems I got in touch with a friend of

Mine the Lake District cyclist or as I like to call him Dave and he does a lot of stuff to to using an action camera up in the Lake District going over all the big passes and stuff so I got in touch with Dave and I said Dave what camera do I need

Cuz I’m sick of the GoPro problems and Dave has recommended that I get this camera which is the DJI osmo action and I must admit first impressions are it is very very good speed camera ahead oh speed camera ahead that’s handy uh yeah so massive thank you to Dave the Lake

District cyclist if you’re into like Lake District cycling and stuff check his channel out I’ll put a a link in the description below right now let’s go and see if we can recover my stolen bike hang on a second I’ve gone the wrong way I don’t do Apple’s navigation I use

Google Maps at the roundabout take the second exit now the problem is it uses Apple’s navigation to where the device was last seen I’m going to have to use find m to actually find where it is arrived right it’s saying my stolen bike is somewhere around here so what I’m going to

Do is I’m going to park up and then fire up the find M to see if I can find my bike right engine off mobile phone glasses CU I’m my blind it get the NOG app do the fine M and apparently it’s just over there somewhere so let’s see

If we can go and find it right so according to to my phone it should be here somewhere right so what it’s telling me is I need to go through over here which is some kind of Conservation Area or something could be further down let’s go and have a look according to my

Phone the bad is in a field that way right this is saying where we need to be things was behind me some kind of Conservation Area over here one baddy too big for me anyway so the baddy decided to uh hide in a field in the middle of nowhere so

It took me a I’m I reckon it’s taking me a good 40 minutes to find them but that’s hardly surprising because the phone the technology relies on an iPhone and there was no iPhones nearby so I’m assuming someone’s pulled into this car park here or something and that has

Activated it and that is how I found them and that’s why it’s taking me roughly 40 minutes to find them right back at the car so yes the bike has been recovered now what the bike Thief did was they came to this Supermarket car car park and they parked in a parking

Space very close to where I’m parked now but then they took the bike out and wield it into a Conservation Area literally you know a few hundred meters over there but by doing that they then went out of the signal of any mobile phones so what so the navigation

System brought me to this point where the bike was last seen but that wasn’t where the bike was and I was basically wandering around the supermarket car park thinking why can’t I find them and it kept telling me the last point it was seen was right here but then all of a

Sudden 20 minutes later it changed its location and it went that few hundred meters over there so what I can only assume was that somebody either with an iPhone went near them or pulled a car pulled up not far from them so it doesn’t show you real time where the

Where the bike is obviously because it’s riant on on on a iPhone to to locate it so if for example you were trying to track the the bike and it was in a car for example traveling along a Motorway you’ve got no chance I think what you’ve

Basically got to rely on is you’ve got to rely on the bike to be in the same location for a set period of time before the Apple find my technology then tells you where to go so for 20 minutes or so it was quite frustrating trying to work

Out where the bike was well that was a bit of fun wasn’t it it’s nice to get out get a bit of sunshine and a bit of fresh air okay so what do I think of the NOG Scout well first of all the alarm it’s simple to use and very effective you can

Find tuneit sensitivity you can adjust the way it notifies you just the bike alarm goes off or the bike and the phone goes off or just your phone goes off off agreed it’s not as loud as say a house alarm or a car alarm but at 85 DB it is

Loud enough for people to stand back and say hm that’s not right you know somebody walked down the road with your bike with that thing going off people should question what’s going on the bike locator now that bike stealing baddy took my bike and I used this technology

And it got it back for me now I had no idea genuinely had no idea where they’d gone they could have gone left and gone to Manchester they could have gone right and gone to Birmingham turns out they only went a few miles down the road but

By using this technology I found it yes the Scout costs more than an air tag but it’s more than an air tag unlike an air tag this is rechargeable and unlike an air tag this is also an alarm an air tag will help you get your bike back should

It get stolen but it won’t tell you someone’s trying trying to steal it the benefits of using this are obvious and I think I’ve gone some way to prove that but are there any negatives to using it in order to receive a push notification to your mobile phone that your bike

Alarm is going off the NOG Scout and the mobile must be within Bluetooth range of each other if they’re not you will not be notified that the alarm’s going off Apple revised their find mine network when they released the air tag this was on the back of stalking Apple may send a

Push notification through to an iPhone user advising them that they are being tracked by a device that is not associated to them if this device is disconnected from its owner and spends enough time traveling with another iPhone user and that user goes to a place they frequent regularly say home

Or work for example they may get a push notification through to their phone telling them that they are being tracked by a device that is not associated to them so Apple’s anti-stalking rules apply when using this device does that mean if an Apple user steals your bike they’ll immediately get notified that

They’re being tracked no it doesn’t work like that now I personally cannot think of any reason why you wouldn’t want to use one of these but I can’t speak for everyone can I so I’ve given it a lot of thought and thought of what reasons may

People say no I don’t want to use one and the first and the most obvious with cyclists and the weight WIS is I don’t don’t want to add excess weight to my bike which is fine I can understand somebody saying that but let’s look at

That closer this weighs 22 G now let me give that some perspective for you this rather Posh drinks bottle not the whole bottle just the lid 22 G that lid weighs exactly the same amount let’s do another one for you this delicious Kit Kat chocolate bar two finger variety that also

Weighs 22 G I don’t want yet another thing to look after and manage and charge on my bike yes agreed you will need to charge it a few times a year and the app will let you know when it drops below 20% but they cost £50 yes it does

But to look at it another way it costs 1% of what that bike cost me so for me personally that is staying on my bike after all why would I take it off now if you’re one of those people that regularly struggles with tubist you should watch that video next or if you

Would like to know how I replaced all the bearings in a free Hub and saved myself having to buy a new one watch that video down there thanks for watching