The Development of Wireless Alarms can Secure your Home

Guest Blog #201, Entry #689, October 4, 2011

 It wasn’t until last night, I truly appreciated the security and protection (and the sense of fortification) a wireless alarm provides. After watching a late night horror flick at home with my wife and kids, I decided to check upon my burglar intrusion alarm only to find that it wasn’t working. On normal days, it wouldn’t bother me and I would just go to sleep and see what I can do the very next day but after watching a sociopathic serial killer for 2 hours, I simply became paranoid!

Security alarms can lend extra protection when needed for your family

Wireless Alarms; it all began with the advent of wireless technology which taught the world how to disgracefully hate anything that comes with a wire. The very first wireless alarm that man has ever known could have been man himself. Imagine ape man coming across a big bear and trying to signal his peers using his crude ‘ooga ooga’ language! But the electronic wireless alarms became emerging in the early 1900s. To be very exact, the first Electro-mechanical system was devised by Edwin Holmes in 1852 where he used a gong to warn when the alarm was tipped. The ‘tipping point’ was a wire which when disturbed caused an attached solenoid to get activated which subsequently caused it to strike the gong. 150 years later, no burglar is dumb enough to step on a tripping ‘wire’ so we had to move on! Wireless alarms gained popularity in the 1930s when remote controlling devices started to mature. This might seem too early but we have clear evidence of such sort used in the 2 world wars. The initial transmission medium of these alarms was electromagnetic hence they had limited operations, range and functionality. Later in the 1950s, with the advent of the transistor, things started to mature for the wireless alarm at a rapid pace.

Security alarms have come a long way!

For a Wireless Alarm to work it requires a trigger. This trigger is applicable only in a specific ‘range’ of the alarm and once activated, it sends a signal through the ‘wireless medium’ to a circuit which in turn takes an action. This action can be anything; a phone call to your cell phone, crazy ringing, a call to the police or maybe play a nice Backstreet Boy’s song to annihilate the burglar completely. This is the basic working on which each and every alarm works. Now the wireless medium can be any. Your wireless sensing device could be sending signals via infra red, or it might be feeding a photovoltaic receiver (very old concept) or it might have a microwave field or ultrasonic field around it and detects any intrusions if that field is disturbed (which results in a Dopler Shift). The possibilities are endless and that is why we have a plethora of wireless alarms these days that range from glass break alarms to motion detecting alarms. The problem doesn’t finish here because it is man who has created these devices so ‘man’ got smarter before these devices got smarter. Due to this reason burglars and criminals come with an improved skill set! He isn’t going to trip on a wire to let you know he is in the house! To tackle this precarious situation companies are equipping their systems with fool proof advancement. It is more like a cat and mouse game where the cat needs to grow on longer claws to catch the sneaky mouse.

Security for years to come

Never the less, there are countless advantages to having a burglar alarm installed at your home. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or very high-tech. Simple motion detectors don’t cost much. So much so, if you do a little bit of research, you can make one of your own using a webcam and a computer!  My parting words would be to ‘play smart to outsmart’ and in the end stay safe.

Russell Hudson is an interior decorator and trainee burglar alarm fitter with a passion for non-horror movies, originally from the United Kingdom now living in Sacramento, California.

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