How does a personal alarm work?

We recommend a personal attack alarm a lot on Epic Traveller. So it’s about time to answer the question of how does a personal alarm work? As well as go over what you can do with one and exactly why we think personal alarms are such good ideas.

To start off with, how does a personal alarm work? Essentially, they are like a sound grenade. With grenades, you pull the pin and the thing explodes. With a personal alarm, you pull the pin and you get an ear piercing sound blast.

It’s the same principle. There’s a circuit within the device and when that is broken something happens – the alarm sounds, the grenade goes off.

It’s all mechanical, not electrical. So it’s a physical movement, not like pressing a button to set off a sound. So triggering the sound doesn’t rely on any computing power or things that could easily break.

That doesn’t mean you can go dropping your personal alarm down the toilet or driving over it – it still has electrical components to make the sound. But there’s a lot less that could go wrong.

You can see the pin and where it fits into the alarm in this picture. Pull that out and an ear splitting 120db alarm goes off. To switch it off, if there is a false alarm or help arrives, you put the pin back in. Which means you can use it again and again.

There are a few different ways you can set up your personal alarm and you can check out our article on how to use a personal alarm which includes some handy hints.

So there’s the answer to how does a personal alarm work? A personal alarm gives a real sense of security when travelling. Hopefully you will never need to use it but it is there if you do.

Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash