Bicycle anti theft / recovery trackers etc.

[Polar Bear]

I know very little about this other than you can stamp a post code onto a bottom bracket shell and there are 'rice grain' tags such as Datatag* which you can conceal within the frame in the hope that a recovered bike can be reunited with the owner.   On cars and motorcycles I note you can get trackers which I presume use GPS and 4g type connectivity to locate the vehicle and inform the owner / tracker company.  Probably overkill for a bicycle.

Also, I am I interested in 'quick deploy immobilisation devices such as nurses locks and steerer locks.

Any experience and recommendations would be welcome.

Thanks.

*  other brands may be available.

[Cunobelin]

They can be quite effective and allegedly have changed car theft

apparently with higher end cars they are now stolen and then "quarantined" by parking in a residential are or such like

That way if there is a tracker it will not be found in the possession of the thief

Increases the likelihood of recovery

The problem with bikes is that they are difficult to hide. There have been those that are built within lights, but as you will need to change batteries etc then they will always have to be accessible and hence easily removable

Boomerang and the Cricket illustrate the point

Others like the Sherlock are more discreet

The other thing that is becoming more common is "Communities" where instead of activating a phone type signal, it notifies others with the same device through Bluetooth... the obvious limitation being that unless you have thousands of that device in your area, it will simply not work