Garage Door Opener = National Security Threat?

[ragingfish]

Quote, originally posted by The Car Connection »Military Opening, Closing Garage DoorsNew weapons system on same frequency as garage openers.by Marty Padgett (2006-12-04)When it comes to millions of garage door opener users and the U.S. military, who comes out on top? That's the question the military is mulling now that a recent test of a new first-responder communication system was found to interfere with hundreds of garage doors around the Colorado Springs area. The new system, Reuters reports, was designed to reach first responders in the case of a homeland security threat. It operates on a radio frequency that's also home to approximately 50 million garage door openers, the news agency says. Hundreds of nearby homes were affected by tests of the system before the Air Force shut down the system while it determines if it can filter out the openers somehow. The Air Force has the right to use the frequency, Reuters adds, and has tested similar systems in Florida, Maryland, and Pennsylvania with similar results. "I never thought my garage door was a threat to national security," one homeowner told the news service.Source: http://www.thecarconnection.co....html

[ColonelPanic]

Oh great, now they're gonna be able to easily find all those WMD's stashed in people's garages. You'd think the FCC would have a problem with this... If I made a device that caused this sort of interference, they'd be all over my (removed) about it. But I guess it's OK for the government to use technology that is in clear violation of FCC rules.

[Vibr8tr]

I don't get why the millitary would ever use a Freq that is that close to one that Civilians use. I mean, the Gov get's a HUGE block of freq's dedicated to just them, why pick this one that is that low? I mean, a garage door opener... that is down there by way of freqs....

[Atomb]

hey, they've progressed from jamming and not allowing doors to open (last November here in ottawa: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottaw....html )to now opening them all the time....took them a year to figure that out....

[Katscan]

Quote, originally posted by Vibr8tr »I don't get why the millitary would ever use a Freq that is that close to one that Civilians use. I mean, the Gov get's a HUGE block of freq's dedicated to just them, why pick this one that is that low? I mean, a garage door opener... that is down there by way of freqs....You're looking at this problem the wrong way and not looking at this logicaly.Your garage door opener operates on a short wave freq, hence why you cant open it from far away, you have to be reletivly close. Not to mention each of those operates on a different frequency and band(Then theres coding so it knows that the signal its recieving is from the remote that was keyed to it). So how does a communications system cause all these garage doors to open simutaniously? I doubt its the communication system operating on a non communications freq. It could be a harmonics problem or just that that particular signal the communications system is operating on causes some frequency anomoly which causes various garage door openers to think its recieving a signal from its remote. It might be an easy fix but I doubt that, it will probably take them a while to pinpoint the exact problem. Im sure they will look at the makes and models of each garage door opener and get the technical info on each to see if there is some corrilation between them to help narrow down the probelm.

[ragingfish]

Quote, originally posted by Katscan »You're looking at this problem the wrong way and not looking at this logicaly.We're talking about a government operation here. How does logic play into it?

[ColonelPanic]

They're logical enough to buy a ten gazillion dollar toilet seat and install it by means of brute force with a five gazillion dollar hammer, then go around whining that the government is broke and have to get more money from us! Here's something I found on the issue... Vedy interesting..... http://www.aaaremotes.com/fccpunoforga.htmlNow, I can see how they can keep the transmitters from working... But I don't get the opening and closing stuff. They can easily send out a signal of x MHz which the opener uses and that would certainly cause problems. If the opener is being bombarded by crap on the same freq, it wouldn't be able to pick up the transmission from the remote. From what it looks like, many garage door openers use something around 390 MHz. The couple of car remotes I've had in the past that I had the urge to look up to see what freq they were on ended up being 300-something MHz. So who knows, maybe we'll luck out and can't use our RKE systems anymore too! Anyway, I still don't get how they can make a door open or close, interference is one thing but what about the random code-hopping stuff that is required to make these devices respond? Somebody's sending out crap on the same frequency and is getting past the random codes needed to make the stuff work. If that guy can make a TV remote scan through most available remote codes and power a TV off, I'd say that the gubment can do the same with a garage door opener considering that they've got the power and rersources. lol!