Invention Lab — Powered by RadioShack®

My wife was watching my daughter Julia and a friend’s son, Asa. They were playing with her phone, which is pretty normal, but today they turned it on silent and hid it. (It has a one touch silent function.) Julia turns one TODAY! And Asa is just a few months older, so I don’t think that it was on purpose. When Asa’s mom came to pick him up, my wife asked her to call her phone because it was missing. After 2 hours of searching, she gave up and hoped we’d find it when I got home.

I came home, and we ate dinner and began the search. We tried a few methods, including turning off all of the lights and calling it hoping to be able to see the light, but in the end, we found it using a simple product from Radio Shack.

My tool? An emergency handheld radio which I used as a homing beacon. When a powered, poorly sheilded speaker is near a cell phone being called, it makes a few distinctive noises, and noises continue to be made during a call.

My wife called her cell from mine a few times, and we finally found the phone. Take a look at where it was! We would have never found it. In fact, after I knew where it was, it still took a minute or two to fish out. The picture is a car seat base which we were replacing.