This is a simple drawing to help you better understand the range of your remote start system. The range of your system is dependent upon many things, such as walls or other obstacles between you and your vehicle.
This is a typical 100′ range system. As you can see, it has only 50′ range from side to side. This is because the systems use directional antennas and they get better range from the front or back of the vehicle as the antenna gets mounted to the inside of the windshield. This is important as most of the time when your vehicle is in a parking lot you will be facing the side of the vehicle so range will be impacted. If you are in a house or building, the range may only be 20-30′ from side to side as these systems work on radio frequencies and have to fight their way out of the building. Commercial buildings that are made of metal, brick, block, and so on have a much bigger impact on range. Any building that has a lot of electronics in it can also affect the range significantly. Let’s look at it another way. Many vendors quote their systems at 1000′ of range. When we test it we may only get 300′ of range under optimum conditions. You go inside of a commercial building and you now have 60-90′ of usable range. Not that good.
Here is where we come in. We give you real, honest, reasonable range on our systems. Our vendor quotes our basic system at 1000′ of range and we sell it as a 300′ system as that is more consistent with our findings. Our reputation is extremely important to us so we do not buy into ” enhanced ” marketing to sell more stuff. We want to sell more because you have faith in us. We are always going to suggest more range for this one simple reason; you want it. After we install your new system and give you a demo of it, you are going to be thrilled knowing your vehicle is going to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The next day you are going to start it from home and it is going to work fine. Here is where it gets tricky. You are slowly going to start using your system more and more as you get more comfortable with it. And sooner than later you are going to try it somewhere and it is NOT going to work. It may be the grocery store. It may be when you are out to eat, at church, the movies, you get the point. The bottom line is that your vehicle is not going to get the benefit of the system you paid to have installed because you did not purchase enough range. We never have people come back to us saying we sold them too much range. Only people asking us how can they make their range better.So the benefit of increased range can become very important. We would tell you simply to make this a major factor in deciding which unit to buy. And we can also tell you that no one has range as good as Compustar in real world tests. And that is all we sell.