@hungrier said in You *will* be chipped. Whether you like it or not.:
I'm no electrical engineer, but being able to ignore distance altogether seems very dubious to me.
I did study electrical engineering (and thus had my dose of on electromagnetism courses), but it's been a rather long time, and EM is a very strange and complicated field.
AFAIR, "ignore distance altogether" is an exaggeration (maybe true in some first-order approximation or something). What you can do is "focus" the electromagnetic wave. Essentially the total power of the wave over an entire closed surface is constant (ignoring losses, which are very small in air; but not e. g. in water). So if you can prevent the wave from getting wider (and thus spreading out over a bigger surface), its power remains constant no matter the distance. This is the effect that creates "antenna gain".
However there is a theoretical limit to this (a "gaussian beam" I think), which is attained for example by lasers. Even the best-focused laser beam will expand with distance, albeit very slowly.
The problem with this technique when dealing with non-contact cards is that, the more the beam is focused, the less the distance is important but the more you'll have to position your card precisely in the beam or the reader won't see it.
Resonance is more relevant to the amount of power you can transmit between the reader and the RFID chip, which is obviously relevant to range, too, but will only get you that far.