Holding a car’s fob to your head to boost its range? You can do better

You'll spot them in the long-term parking lots at most airports, wandering around like the undead, trying to find their lost car. After some fruitless traipsing up and down the rows, they'll eventually resort to it.

Yep, the old trick of holding the key fob to their heads to increase its range.

We've been told that this trick works by using the liquids inside your head such that your entire noggin is acting as some sort of rudimentary antenna, boosting the range of the fob. It sounds plausible.

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Indeed, the a New York Times ran an article back in 2009 where Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer explained, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.”

You might have tried it. Or the next-level move, holding the fob under your chin and opening your mouth, like some krill-sifting basking shark.

I have an opinion on this. You're missing a trick.

Sure, I've tried it and it does seem to work, but I reckon there's something that works even better and I'll walk you through what it is.

I'm doing a test to see if it works with an Audi Q3 that I have on test. We're also doubling up and seeing if it works with a garage door opener too. We're getting properly scientific here. Sort of.

The first thing I learned from the first attempt is that modern car remotes have one heck of a range. I gave up measuring at 80 metres distance because I had run out of street. Time to move to a more suitable location.

A sports field seems about perfect, with little in the way of things to interfere with the radio signal.

This test involved holding the key fob as you normally would, at around waist height, and then moving away from the vehicle until the unit could no longer lock or unlock the car.

We must have almost hit the limit on our earlier attempt, because on this one, the maximum distance reached from the vehicle was 81 metres.

Sure enough, by elevating the fob, we were able to usefully extend the range, this time to 99 metres,

Did we get extra range by doing this arcane method? Yes we did, but only by another two metres (101m).

I'm not sure that's worth the embarrassment of walking about in public looking as if you're trying to mind-meld with a plastic fob. And I'm really not sure I like the idea of the liquids in my brain being used as an antenna.

Lift the key fob as high above your head as possible and the available range extends to 110 metres. We tried this a couple more times and replicated the results consistently.

Intrigued by the numbers we were getting, I decided to verify the results we'd achieved with the Audi with my home garage door opener. Willing to stand the twitching curtains down a perpendicular street, I scored a result of 42 metres with the fob at waist height, 61 metres at head height, 63 metres held aginst my head and a whopping 76 metres held above my head. That's a 21 percent range improvement.

Yes, the garage door remote works on a different radio frequency to the car's fob, but the results corroborate our earlier tests.

Basically, you're achieving only a small benefit in range (in the region of two per cent) by using your head as an antenna. So while it's not an utterly useless thing to do, you're still dudding yourself of metres of possible range.

As you can probably tell from the pattern of results, by far the bigger boosting factor to the range of your key fob is elevation off the ground.

So if you hold the fob above your head, you're going to get far superior results, whether it's for your car or your garage door, than trying to zap your brain.

Selfie sticks and drones? Maybe we'll get round to that next time.