Monday, May 12, 2008

Myth: Unlocking car with your cellphone

Did anyone of you received a forwarded email which suggests that in the event you happened to misplaced your car key or lost it, and someone has a spare key of yours that you can just called up that person and have him point the remote through his phone and press on it. The signal will be sent through the phone's network and to your phone which in turns will unlock your car.

Been wanted to test this for a long time and there was this time me and my friend, we had just finished our dinner at McD. Then suddenly he asked me bout this and I told him yeah yeah, I've received this kinda email many many times but somehow forgotten to test it out. Curiously, both of us agreed to give it a go. He went outside, walked a distance away from his car, tried to unlock his car with his remote and if he's still within range he'll walk further until the signal weren't in the radius anymore. He called me through his cellphone, I picked it up, he said : 'are you ready?'. 'yeah yeah lets do this' I said. After that I held my phone near his front door. As I readied for the unlocking sound/ lights from his car... I see none, I went back and listen to the phone, we agreed to give it another go, pointed to the car door again... I held the phone... and... nothing happened. gosh, what was I thinking. And suddenly I realized that it was around 6something in the evening and the car was parked just beside a main road where there's all those cars caught up in a massive evening jam.

Somehow I could feel the 'Alien' stares I was given to by those people who watched my entire ordeal through their jam. Urgh, at least I've found out that it didn't work out this way.

The reason I'm posting this is because just now I heard radio's DJ kinda discussed bout this topic on my way back. Not wanted to post this without finding out whether is there anything that we've done wrongly or not, I went to the net and search through some info. Found this short and precise answer that someone posted...

"Radio Frequency waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, whereas sound waves are vibrations (some physicists prefer to think of sound as extremely rapid yet minute changes in pressure) in the air. A microphone in a cell phone is moved back and forth by the sound waves (which is why it is often useful to think of sound waves as changes in pressure). This causes a process known as induction (the microphone cone has a magnet on it that moves in a coil, producing extremely small electrical charges) which is then turned into a signal that can be broadcast via radio waves (completely different kind of waves, as I mentioned before), probably using a digital signal processor of sorts. This signal is then decoded by the receiving phone, which generates an electrical signal that is sent to the speaker on the phone. Radio waves from a keyless entry remote would not cause any movement in the microphone, thereby not generating any signal for the phone to transmit. Simply put, this wouldn't work at all." - In case u're too lazy to read all those out... the shorter answer is.... yes.. it won't work.

P/S: Next time when you received that email, probably can stop circulating the myth. haha

1 comment:

yuki tenshi said...

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lu jungle monkey!!~~~
2lalalalalalala
*blek*

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