Couple of months ago I have purchased Ducati Performance alarm for my 749. It is the nice alarm with no need to cut into wiring loom, immobilise bike in 2 points (ignition and starter relay) and it's sensitivity to bike movement is good with no accidental alarm tripping. It bolts to the side of horizontal belt cover. It was very easy to install as it came with instruction manual. http://www.munroemotors.com/imagedb/products/89/89_mid.jpg However, as these alarms are no longer manufactured by Cobra for Ducati (no customer service) and most of them are sold as NOS stock, they suffer from internal battery gaving up (not one in the key, but in the module itself) a ghost due to end of storage life. They have internal NiCd batteries for the alarm to sound if someone removes battery from bike. However if NiCd are bad, your alarm would either stop arming itself or would not disarm at all leaving you stranded on side of the road. I was very happy with mine until it one day refused to go to armed mode and would not respond to key until the bike was turned on in ignition key. Some alarm failures manifastate into unresponsive alarm that is permanently armed, but mine was behaving bit weird as from time to time it responded, but it was very erratic I suspected the internal battery, therefore I opened the alarm's case: Imgur The case itself is secured with some sort of security screws (shape of butterfly on top of the screw) but it is easily opened with just flat screwdriver. In that image you can see 2 halves of the alarm unit, upper half shows the PCB of the alarm itself. Bottom half shows the piezo buzzer and 7.2V (actually 6x1.2V NiCd) internall battery in green shrinkwrap. The battery showed 0.95V instead of 7.2V (as when it shoud be in charged state), so I immediately new my hunch was right that the batery is fubar. Once I pulled out the cells from shrinkwrap, almost all of them were 0V and heavily corroded with leaked salt electrolytes on them. You can get spare tiny button cell NiCd batteries online, however they tend to be expensive. There is a neat source of tiny button cells: 9V rechargeable batteries. 9V batteries contain internally connected series pack of 1.2V cells that make up together around 8.4V - 9V. So I purchased 9V for £1.50 from local store and dissasemble it. Example here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ls.jpg/200px-9V_innards_3_different_cells.jpg 9V can come in many internal configuration, either tiny pencil like-cells, rectangle like cells or button like cells. Once I dissasembled 9V battery, I have made a 7.2V pack out of it and put it back into the alarm case. Imgur (on the left is old 7.2V pack, on the right you can see dissasembled 9V and some soldered button cells) Seems to work fine so far, It has been a week since I done this and the alarm works nicely again. I have decided to write this up, as I believe many of us have these units on their 749/999 and it is only a question of time or luck until it alarm gives up its ghost due to this and this fix prolongs its use.
It's not unusual for cells to leak like this. You can buy these packs ready to go from CPC and Maplin stores. It's normally really hard to DIY solder these batteries without damaging the seals (worth opening it up again to check they aren't leaking). Nice write up.
