Like most newer cars, my car came with a little plastic keychain which has a few buttons on it. If you press one of the buttons, the car doors unlock. Another button locks the doors.
Anyway, the system has worked great for a few years now except that there is one block in the city where the system pretty much never works. Common sense says that there is some transmission source in that area which is interfering with the signal. What might it be? A cell phone tower? A clandestine meth lab? A secret government facility like in Men in Black?
In the Pt Loma area of San Diego garage doors openers and keyless entry issues arise from time to time. Conventional wisdom points to a high tech Navy installation nearby.
Could someone on the block have built a Faraday cage? Or maybe someone could be using one of those… something-emitters to block cell phone signals in the area? (they’re illegal though)
Do any other electronics go haywire/dead in the vicinity? Have you tried using it from really close up and it still doesn’t work? Is it equally affected from all directions around the vehicle, or just from one side?
A high powered transmitter, such as a paging transmitter, could overload the receiver in the car and prevent it from decoding your key fobs transmission. Happened to me once in Chicago while we were parked near the CPD’s transmitter site.
Pager transmitters commonly radiate 1000 watts or more.