Today I parked the car in the town car park and it wouldn't lock with the remote,so I manualy locked it..came back, the remote wouldnt turn the immobiliser off..so off I go to a jewellers to change the battery on the keyfob £3.50.. came back, still nothing..phoned AA..be here in an hour, so I put in another £1.40 to park while I wait..then some bloke on his mobile was talking to RAC on his mobile and he had exactlly the same problem as me and had just come back from the jewellers to change his battery..then believe it or not another 4 people showed up with exactly the same problem..we were all parked quite close to each other (10 yards or so)..then all of a sudden mine worked so I cancelled the AA..the others were still stuck...on a hill above the car park there are 4 huge masts, don't know what they do but I think they're interfering with some keyfobs..very odd..

 

I think mobile phone antenna can cause this. Dont you have the keypad where you punch the 4 digit code?

 

Yes..got the pad but not the code..Subaru want £26 for it..one of those things I keep meaning to do

 

really? my local dealer looked up the code for free for me. Maybe try another dealer if theres any local

 

This was from the one in Cardiff that's now closed..cheers, I'll try another one.

 

Funny you said that mate it happens to me the other week took me over an hour for it to work

 

Rumour has it that car thieves have alarm jammers so you "lock" the car & walk away yet cos they've jammed your key fob they can just stroll over to the car & steal contents or the car ... any dodgy looking characters at that place today?

TX.

 

That's an interesting theory..didn't spot any, but they could have been sat in a car..I was only gone 10 mins

 

The ferrie to France is a block on my alarm system. Every Nurburgring trip sees me having to wait until the ships communications have been switched off before I can get in the car and drive off.

 

At work we have lorries that deliver large switch gear. They use a mini crane that is operated by a wireless remote control that the driver uses.
While the remote is engaged no central locking works within about 50M. Apparently it sends out a jamming signal so no other wireless gadgets can interfere with the controlling of the crane.

 

Weird...

 

Used to happen quite often when I had my first Impreza, MY01 WRX.

If you can, just push it a couple of meters if you can, and hey presto... the key-fob will work again!

It's something to do with the bandwidth the key-fob uses, which is affected by radio masts, infrared/automatic doors etc!

Never had any problems with MY05 STi or MY07 RB320

 

Yep, quite common.

Our classic does this, the kebab man is quite used to pushing the car down the road a bit

 

Tetra interferance can cause this on older alarms that work on 433-434MHz frequency bands can the alarm receiver's frequency tolerance was not brilliant and picked up noise on freqencies outside of the intended frequency band. This is most notable on aftermarket alarms and factory retrofits that are fitted after the car is built (i.e Sigmas in Subaru and Scorpions in Toyotas etc).

However newer alarms (2002ish onwards) should be fine as they either work on 868Mhz or have better tuned reciever circuitry that filters out the noise from 'out of range' frequencies better. If they play up...look around for someone shifty or loitering in a car.

 

Mine's an 03 Blob, there was an older Rover a Toyota and an Audi A4, that I saw, roughlly all the same age.
Oddly enough, I do recall walking past two Polish sounding women with heavily tattooed legs...the mind boggles.

 

Common problems with classics up to 2001 then there wasa fix available
Metro centre at Newcastle happened to be guy said he gets called out 15 times a day for these things
Just push the car a few yards to start it
Even appended to me in bq car park as it was near a police transmitter it mobile phone mast
Hold the fob up to your chest and crouch down onto the wing might help

 

Try Jenkins Suzuki, they have taken over the Subaru franchise and are pretty helpful

 

Has happened to me a few times, were i used to live there is a police headquarters and if i went to waitrose i would end up being stuck there for a while as the fob wouldn't work. Also happened at a local sainsburys, took just over half an hour for it to disarm itself.

 

It s real easy to set a new pin code of your choice. No need to visit a dealer. I'm sure its been posted on here before.
Dip.

 

Yes - how to change the ping with a working fob has been posted on here many times

 

very common. Had it on my blob. Lakeside shopping centre was especially bad. first time it happened called rac and they towed me all around the car park with no joy. Put me on his flatbed and 2 mins out of lakeside all was well!

 

The huge benefit you have with a sigma/standard alarm, is when this happens, you can just use the keypad. It makes you think how annoying it is for others cars without the keypad.

Anyway, as mentioned, you can change your PIN with a working fob. Just do a search.

 

My Toad could be overidden by entering a "PIN" via cycling the ignition switch ON/OFF.

I think some early OEM systems in cars can be overidden the same way or by locking/unlocking the driver's door with the key (i.e MG/Rover).

as the old saying goes: "Read the manual!"

 

The venerable aftermarket Laserline 921 has this feature.