I do not know.
I suspect it is so that the system can track the fob after the bike has started to move and alert the rider to the loss of a fob. Otherwise there would be no warning at all that the fob was missing. As it is there might not be any warning for quite some time if the bike was traveling at high speed for a long time after the fob was lost.
It has been mentioned that part of the original Mitsubishi system that Kawasaki uses did contain a lost fob function along with some type of readout as to how far back the fob was lost. The story goes that with that system intact, if you were to lose a fob while riding, the bike would indicate the loss along with an 'up count' of the distance traveled since losing the fob. Something about that does not ring true though because 1) why would Mitsubishi put such a system in an auto (it was not developed for motorcycles but rather cars) when a fob is extremely unlikely to be lost from the car while it is moving. 2) how would the KiPass system (MISTY originally) keep track of mileage or tie into the vehicle's electronics to monitor this? 3) Most importantly: the system would have to keep polling the fob to make sure it was within range to be able to detect the fob no longer being present. That would tend to kill fob batteries pretty rapidly by making the fob broadcast much more often than the system calls for now.
Brian
Brian
Why this?