I tried it too and it did help, but not consistently nor did it add much more distance.

Well, I tried it again and it DIDN’T work, so…..*shrugs*

I wonder if this would work with garage door openers. I’ll try it out tomorrow. Though my neighbors might wander what I’m doing standing there with a remote control pointed at my head.

It

BTW here is a SaferFW link:

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/4917/

I keep meaning to post here. This works consistently for me and also for multiple people with my car. It’s actually useful because I find the range on my remote to be quite piddly normally.

I really didn’t expect it to work, but I can produce the effect over and over. I get about one and a half times as far with it under my jaw than I do with it just in my hand. I also tried holding the remote up in the air to see if it was the elevated height (normally you’d probably hold it lower) and didn’t get the same additional distance.

Perhaps it depends on what frequencies the remote uses?

Necro-posting in a not-quite one year old thread.  Yay me!

So I just got an email of “Five Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do”.

Four things didn’t impress me.  They seemed to possibly be regional and/or involve entering various codes onto the phone that you’d probably never remember when you needed them.  But one of the things made me remember this thread and make me wonder whether it works or not.

So any thoughts?  Anyone interested in trying it out?  Let us know.

Have you locked your keys in the car?
> Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone. If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. This will save someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other “remote” for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
> Editor’s Note: It works! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a cell phone!

Obviously, this only works if the “spare keys are at home” and attached to another remote keyless entry device.

The email has no information giving a source for this information so I have no idea who the “Editor” is that tried it out.

That seems so unlikely…I will try it when my roommate gets home though, should be pretty easy to test.

Hmm, wonder if this would work if there’s only one keyless entry remote and with a regular cordless phone and a cell phone?  I may have to see if Dave wants to try this.

I knew snopes had a page on this…

Relaying remote entry system signals via telephone might work if the signals were sound-based, but they’re not. An RKE system transmits an encrypted data stream to a receiver inside the automobile via an RF (radio frequency) signal, a signal that can’t be effectively relayed via cell phone. (In any event, RKE systems and cell phones typically operate on completely different frequencies; the former in the 300 MHz range and the latter in the 800 MHz range.)

(More than a few people have inadvertantly fooled themselves into believing the cell phone method of unlocking car doors actually works because they tried it and achieved the desired results - not realizing their cars were still within range of their keyless remote devices, and the signals that unlocked the doors were transmitted the usual way [i.e., through the air], not via cellular phone connections.)

It’s possible this method might work with cars that use something different than standard RKE systems, but it doesn’t work with the vast majority of models.

Boo - 23 May 2008 09:45 AM

I knew snopes had a page on this…

The old MOH forum does as well:

Relaying remote entry system signals via telephone might work if the signals were sound-based, but they’re not. An RKE system transmits an encrypted data stream to a receiver inside the automobile via an RF (radio frequency) signal, a signal that can’t be effectively relayed via cell phone. (In any event, RKE systems and cell phones typically operate on completely different frequencies; the former in the 300 MHz range and the latter in the 800 MHz range.)

This would be true if mobile phones were sound-based, but they’re not either. There is nothing intrinsically impossible about the RKE signal propagating as a side-band on the mobile phone signal. The difference in frequencies quoted by Snopes is a red herring, RKEs use a carrier frequency in the MHz range, the actual frequency of the datastream in a few hundred Hertz, easily capturable and transmissible by a mobile phone.

The question is really does an RKE cause detectable interference with a mobile phone at one end, and reproduce that datastream with sufficient fidelity to open the car at the other. It is very unlikely that this is so, but it is not impossible as Snopes is arguing, and certainly not for the reasons they suggest.