One of my favorite stories of recent weeks involved an electrician who wanted to goof off but whose whereabouts were monitored by management via his GPS. He couldn’t turn it off because they’d know, so instead he stuck inside one of those shiny foil potato chip bags, which acted as a Faraday cage to block the signal. Management thought the signal had been lost, so he could go play golf.
I thought this was so cool that I decided to test it, using the remote starter for my car. I pulled an empty TGIF Friday Potato Skins bags out of the trash (you don’t except me to pay money for that crud, do you?), put my key inside it and pressed the car’s starter button.
The car started right up. As MythBusters might say: BUSTED!
Or maybe not. I’m not sure how the signal from a remote starter compares to a GPS, so that might make a difference. Also, the story above comes from Australia – maybe their potato chip bags (actually, it was a bag of Twisties crunchy cheesy corn snacks) contain more conductive material than our bags do. Or maybe TGIF Fridays just make crummy metallic-looking bags.
Either way, if you’re trying to block signals, don’t count on using this cheapskate trick to save the 5 to 10 bucks to its costs to buy a metallic Faraday cage bag
Return to the Concord Monitor
Are you sure the bag was real metal, or was it just metal appearing plastic?
Yep – I have also experimented with this. Put my phone inside an AUSTRALIAN silver lined chip packet and then called my phone – it rang.
Although – I also have an app that records my GPS at 5 second intervals. Turned that on, returned the phone to the chip packet and the GPS signal went dead. GPS is blocked by the chip packet, but not 4G signals. Not sure if this is to do with frequency or signal strength. Phone towers are much closer than GPS satelites
That’s funny because I gave a faraday bag made from a potato bag and it works. Granted I tweaked it, but it’s bad as hell and fits in my mobility scooter.
They work, stop this trying push this nonsense that it doesn’t work.