Bite alarms are brilliant little gadgets that have revolutionised the way we fish. They’re designed to monitor any line movement and let you know as soon as something happens.
Not only are they more sensitive than the human eye, they never take a break, need the bathroom, or need to take a nap.  In fact, their ‘always on’ examination of your line let’s you take a break from staring at your rods waiting for that magical moment.  The modern fishing bite indicators sits snug on your rod rest with your line running through the top. When a fish decides to try and take a nibble, the line moves, and the bite alarm gives you a heads-up both visually and audibly.
You can also connect you alarm head to a receiver; this allows you to take a walk along the bank, chat to friends or just some well earned sleep without missing a bite.  You can connect multiple alarms to a single receiver, although most people go for a set of 3.

How Do Carp Bite Alarms Work?

How do they work? Well, there are two types, the magnetic wheel and the Piezo vibration sensor, invented by Del Romang in the early 80s.  From our perspective, there is no other alarm that offers the sensitivity of the Piezo Sensor, it is second to none.
A standard magnetic wheel setup is straightforward – your line pulls through, tickling the wheel, which then sweeps past a sensor and sets the alarm off. On the flip side, the Piezo vibration sensor, with its Y-shaped guide, picks up on vibrations, triggering the alarm to make some noise and light up like a Christmas tree. Vibration offers significant benefits over a basic roller alarm such as no snagging or freezing, and it detects vibrations in the line as well as linear (forward and backword) movement. Overall, the advanced vibration type alarm delivers significantly greater sensitivity to your fishing experience.
That being said, most bite alarms offer a similar range of features:

Tone/Sound

Delkim is famous for it’s warble, a unique sound that’s music to your ears when you get that run!

Volume

Up to 20 different settings, switch it up during the day or lower it for night time fishing so you don’t wake up your neighbour on the lake.

LEDs

With several rods on the go, the LEDs are a visual cue to help you select the right rod quickly and ensure a smooth catch.

Sensitivity

This is where a vibration sensing alarm will smash all other options, but whichever you choose you can adjust the alarm so that’s it’s sensitive to the fish, and not the weather. Dial it down for heavy rain or wind, turn it up for calmer waters.

Batteries

The Delkim alarms are powered by a single 9v battery, high powered, long lasting and available from just about anywhere.

Material

Tough, water-resistant plastic and manufactured for the wet.  Delkim’s are built to last with some users sticking with a single set of alarms for over 20 years!  Making these alarms weather resistant is important, especially as, at some point, one of your alarms is probably going to take little swim.

Bite Indicators

As additional kit, bite indicators are well worth the investment. They help to keep your line taut as it runs through the alarm as well as offering a further visual indication if anything is happening under the water.

Receiver

For those night sessions or if you fancy a wander, a receiver is your best friend. It syncs with your alarms and keeps you in the loop with sound and light alerts, ensuring you never miss a chance for a catch.
There you have it, a crash course in bite alarms, a great additional to any tackle box whether you’re bivvied up under the stars or enjoying a sunny day by the water.
Our flagship Txi-D bite alarm is ready to go straight out of the box, or you can check out our range of ‘how to’ videos to get the most out of your set. Click here to go to YouTube or here to download the Delkim App where you’ll also get access to exclusive offers and content.
Bite alarms are about making your fishing smarter, not harder. Happy fishing.

We are sure that most regular anglers appreciate the core difference between the Delkim indication system and other alarms.  However, we sometimes get asked WHY we have such faith in our method, when it is technically so much harder to get right than a wheel?
Well, we never cut corners at Delkim.  We don’t do ‘easy’.  We strive to be the best.  We want our products to give maximum performance for the user, regardless of the technical challenges.  We are focused on delivering the best possible indication across all conditions, and that is why we have always, and will always, use our direct vibration sensing system.  If you get more indication, you know more about what’s going on in front of you.  And that can only increase your chances of a fish.
Firstly, let us look at how almost all other alarms indicate, using a roller wheel.  No matter whether the wheel breaks a light beam, uses magnets to trigger a sensor,  or uses some other method,  the same fundamental rule applies.  The wheel MUST rotate a certain amount for the alarm to sound, or for any data to be imparted to the internal software.  And this limits the information that you, as an angler, can receive.
Others have tried vibration sensing in conjunction with a wheel on their higher end models, but this is a compromise.  It is still not direct contact between line and sensor, so information will be lost.
We’ve spoken to anglers who don’t really care about all this.  They only fish for carp, only care about full blooded runs, and aren’t interested in sensitivity or adjustability.  That’s fine, but they are missing out on fish.  We are not just saying this as a sales pitch.  It’s an unarguable fact which is illustrated in the rest of this article.
With the Delkim vibration system, the line is in direct contact with the sensor, the tip of which is made from extremely tough PEEK thermoplastic.  The sensor generates a current whenever it vibrates.  It is this current generated by the vibration of the sensor which feeds into our specially developed software.

Our piezo sensor is incredibly sensitive.  For example, tapping the alarm is enough to cause a bleep when response is set to maximum, as is blowing across the sensor.   In fact, that’s part of how we individually test our alarms – by blowing!  It can even be triggered by the right frequency of sound.
The sensor is almost a living thing.  It is actually always moving to some tiny degree in response to its surroundings, and it is constantly generating a signal which is interpreted by our software and modulated according to requirements.
Our software is the unsung hero of our alarms.  It takes many, many hundreds of hours of programming, testing and fine tuning before we are happy.   Taking the raw signal from the sensor, refining, smoothing and interpreting it is no easy task.  Which is perhaps why, being used to much simpler and less useful methods, the ‘wheel men’ haven’t matched us in 30 years of trying!
Of course, this kind of sensitivity isn’t generally needed in many angling situations.  This why we have a huge range of settings, from super sensitive to gale-resistant.  It’s the software which allows this controllability.  For most anglers, a Delkim can be used ‘straight out of the box’ with little no fine tuning.  But the tunability is there for when it is needed, and the high sensitivity end is especially useful in picking up things that a wheel won’t see.   We’ll illustrate the usefulness of our system with some examples, some from personal experience,  and others drawn from feedback from our customers:

• A customer was fishing a carp lake once, casting long to a feature. It was calm, so he had the Delkim sensitivity cranked up to the max.  He started getting liners which were enough to give single bleeps; fish were clearly moving closer in!  He recast and caught a brace of 20’s in short order.  He later found out that the previous angler had baited the closer in spot heavily and the fish had moved in after he left.  A wheel simply would not have picked up these liners and he’d have probably left with a blank.
• One of our staff members does a lot of pike fishing, and most serious pike anglers already understand the usefulness of the Delkim system. Pikers tend to use a tight line and drop arm indicators underneath an open bale arm.  Sometimes the line clip on the drop arm needs to be quite tight to combat conditions, and he has personally seen a fish pick up a bait, kite several feet on the tight line, and drop it again, without his fellow angler’s roller wheel alarm even giving a bleep.  A Delkim would not have missed this.  Pike, especially on pressured waters, can be incredibly shy when they feel resistance.  The Delkim will give an indication of the line tightening even if the drop arm indicator doesn’t move, and furthermore, it will continue to properly indicate when the drop arm comes off and free line is running over the sensor.  With a wheel, there is often not enough friction to cause rotation when the line is running freely over it.
• The above issue with the wheel also applies when using ultralight bobbins for species such eels or roach. ‘Line skip’ can be real problem with wheeled alarms and can lead to the angler having to compromise their indication by using heavier bobbins or tighter lines in order to get the alarm to sound effectively.
• More and more anglers are using alarms when night fishing for barbel. In this situation,  the rod tips are high and the line is tight;  sometimes very tight if fishing one of the big rivers like the tidal Trent,  where anglers have been known to use 12oz of lead just to hold bottom!  This necessitates a tighter baitrunner or drag to stop line being peeled off by the flow,  and as a result,  big liners and bites can bang the rod tip over to a surprising degree without any actual linear line movement.  A Delkim, set correctly, can sense the vibration of these knocks through both the line and the rod itself.  A wheel won’t move and won’t tell you anything.  You could sit there all night using a roller wheel alarm without ever knowing you had fish in the swim.

Of course, there are other advantages over a wheel.  Our sensor can’t freeze and is unaffected by extremes of heat or cold.  It can’t jam.  It works 100% of the time regardless of conditions.  And you still have the ability to tune each ‘D’ range head using a balance of response and speed settings, so that it is very deaf to wind and rain, yet still gives a proper indication of a run.  You have the best of all worlds; incredible sensitivity when that one liner might make the difference between a fish and a blank, all the way through to the ability to tune the heads for the worst conditions, without missing that precious run.
This why we are so confident when we say that Delkim WILL catch you more fish.  There is no other alarm on the market that indicates the way ours does.  Ours is the only alarm which works through direct vibration sensing, maximising the sensing capability as a result.
Because better sensing means more information.  And more information means more fish on the bank.