i have a 791xv viper alarm with remote start installed in my tC. the other night i went out to eat, amd brought my 2-way pager along to see how far the car can page my transmitter. i was about 5-6 miles away... and i still received a page from my car telling me everything is fine..... and by receiving, i mean the icon in the upper left hand corner flashes. when i was that far away, the frequency of rcv'ing the pages was less, but i still received a page. does anybody think this is odd? is the transmitter/receiver pager malfunctioning?

so to test if this is really working.. i can drive more than 5 miles away, and ask my friend to purposely set off my alarm, and see if i get a change in the status on the pager....

any opinions? ideas? i know the pager has a 1/4 mile limited range because its powered only by a AAA battery... but does the transmitter in the car have THAT much range??

 

that seems very odd... myabe you were just in a "good spot" 5 miles seems very long that's almost half a city away...

 

yeah i believe most alarms have about a 1/4 mile or up to 2 miles.

 

after playing around with my alarm this afternoon, i discovered that the pager is set to "page" mode, in which every now and then, it will wake itself up, and check to see if it received a alarm status from the car... i blieve that this is what the rcv icon was showing me, that fact that it was checking, not that it received something. this is kinda stupid then. but i guess it beats not having a 2-way remote at all, and not knowing that my car alarm was set off in the middle of the night right outside my apartment.

peace of mind, even if its a little piece.

 

that light blinks all the time, even if your on the opposite side of the country of your car. it doesnt mean that its recieving signal, its means its checking the air waves to see if it was sent a signal. itll only work up to a half mile of so

 

the long range is really useless, isn't it? when my friend and i went into an alarm shop to ask questions before i got my alarm, the sales was throwing around a lot of hype about two-way alarms. "yea! it has shock sensors and [blah blah blah] and the pager has a range of two miles!" Then, my friend says the obvious, "So I gotta run two miles everytime my pager goes off?"

I bought the more basic alarm.

 

The range is pretty ridiculous compared to the boasted values by Viper... I have the same one but from Clifford, the Matrix 2.5. They're all made by the same company Directed Electronics but i'd say dont pick one up unless you get a SICK discount. I got mine for 200 and installed for another 100 with an extra horn, and a 2-zone radar. This is when I worked at Best Buy and the employee discount brought it down to $200. Other than that I dont think I'll ever walk as far as a mile away from my car anyway. Another big factor is what is in between your keychain transmitter and the antenna thats included. If theres a huge building in between the two then obviously its not gonna get anywhere... it does though go through cars in a parking lot which helps when you seem to have lost your car

 

thieves will often break into your car at a few places... in front of your house, in front of your work place, the mall, or movie theaters... most of the time your within a 1/4 mile from your car... but transmission through a mall, or theater might be "iffy"...

 

For some reason I always thought those "pager" alarms would reach you anywhere, like a real pager. Now that I think about it, that would be stupid...

<--- me

-THE DON

 

im more scared of getting a door ding than getting my car stolen. if i got a two way alarm, it would be so that i can run to my car and bust the ____er who just put a dent on my door.

i think the flashing LED that tells theives you have an alarm is the most effective part of an alarm. haha.