It will be recalled (blog article, April 30, 2026) that recently I had a luggage tracking tag get knocked loose from my suitcase and the tag ended up at an airport in Portugal. Thanks to comments from loyal readers, I was inspired to try harder on this.
Until now my way of attaching a luggage tracking tag to my luggage was nylon cable ties. Readers asked, why not simply place the tag inside the luggage. Then it cannot get knocked loose. The answer to this, as any of your amateur radio friends or electrical engineer friends will tell you, is that putting the tag inside the suitcase necessarily attenuates the radio signal (which is Bluetooth Low Energy) and means that if anyone’s phone is going to detect the lost suitcase, it would need to be closer to the suitcase to pick up the signal.
To say this another way, if you want to minimize how many hours or days pass before somebody’s phone picks up the signal, you would be daft to place the tag anywhere inside the suitcase. The correct place for the tag is outside the suitcase.
At the time of the previous blog article, what I did was to repeat my previous mistake of relying on nylon cable ties. And rather predictably, yet another tracking tag went on walkabout, this time to a resting place at San Francisco airport.
After my posting of the previous blog article, alert reader Debra M. Konnerth suggested I use stainless steel cable.
This prompted me to realize that in my toolbox I already had some ¹⁄₁₆-inch cable made of 304 stainless steel, and matching crimping sleeves. In the photo you can see the bolt cutter (top left) with 18-inch handles, and the swaging tool (bottom left) with 16-inch handles. You can see the ¹⁄₁₆-inch cable at bottom right and the crimp sleeves at top right.
As you will see from the photo at the top of this article, I chose to use two sleeves.
Now let’s see if this tracking tag gets knocked loose.
Thank you as always for the helpful suggestions in the comments in the previous article.