Royds' Caravan Europe: 24. Feeling alarmed

L’isle-Saint-Cast

Tim says "do this"

We are now in the hands of Dr Tim's notes, drawn onto Ed's 1970's road atlas, which was given to us as a joke but is referred to daily as the real navigation is left to the GPS app and it is an excellent, hardcover overview. Thank you Ed & Elaine.

I need to plug the nav system we are using which is CoPilot. It lets me add different vehicles, the cruise speed and most importantly, the vehicle dimensions. As a result CoPilot does not take you down tiny roads to save fifty metres thereby stranding the Giantavan. Our dimensions are fifteen metres long, two and a half metres wide, nearly three metres tall and weighing in at over five tonnes. Travelling to the Norfolk broads we went in a big anticlockwise semicircle up to Acle and then drove south to put us on suitable roads, stress free. So far it has not let us down.

Drizzly but not cold, today was the day to tackle the Phantom alarm & tracker system.

Yup, that's the sea in the background

Last night Fyfe was very excited to see “old cars” in the hotel carpark over the road. I was delighted to see that they were not glamour cars, over restored but hard working old beasts much like those promoted by Stephanie and Ian’s Classic Motoring Society in NZ. I have added some snaps to bottom of this blog. It looked like they were having a great time. Delighted to see a Renault Dauphine as in 1982 I car pooled regularly to Lincoln College (as it was then) in one.

Alarming included thin literature stating that it takes two hours to install. Not bad for a £700 package. Took me the rest of the day. The first part was drawing my own wiring diagram as to how to make the two units (alarm & tracker) communicate with each other. This was made a greater challenge by the wiring colours supplied not matching the instructions and some wires not included in the drawings at all. I hope that our own product fares better with our dealers. The system includes; wired alarm, separate wired tracker; two wireless door switches; two wireless PIRs; two different remotes, a control app. As the Giantavan has a two piece door, the top can open independently from the bottom I decided to install both wireless door switches on the door in case the bottom half gets forced separately from the top, in the future. This means I will need to tackle an electrical shop in the next day or two in pursuit of a couple of microswitches for the two outside lockers. Tomorrow I will contact Phantom to programme it.

While installing the children returned from exploring the beach (RT in hand) and declared that they were going swimming. As it was 14ºC and five in the afternoon, I declined to assist / supervise quashing the very scheme.