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All Your Garage Door are Belong to us!
By Charlie
Homeowners up in arms: U.S. military frequency jams hundreds of garage doors
Homeowners up in arms: U.S. military frequency jams hundreds of garage doors ROBERT WELLER DENVER (AP) - What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A lot, it seems.A secretive U.S. air force facility in Colorado Springs, Colo., tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat.
But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the surrounding area found their garage doors had suddenly stopped working.
"It would have been nice not to have to get out of the car and open the door manually," said Dewey Rinehard, pointing out that the outage happened during the first cold snap of the year when temperatures fell well below freezing.
Capt. Tracy Giles of the 21st Space Wing said air force officials were trying to figure out how to resolve the problem of their signal overpowering garage door remotes.
"They (military officials) have turned it off to be good neighbours," he said.
The signals were coming from Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, home to the North American Aerospace Defence Command, a joint U.S. and Canadian operation set up during the Cold War to monitor Soviet missile and bomber threats.
Technically, the air force has the right to the frequency, which it began using nearly three years ago at some bases. Signals have previously interfered with garage doors near bases in Florida, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
In general, effects from the transmissions would be felt only within 15 kilometres, but the Colorado Springs signal is beamed from atop 1,855-metre Cheyenne Mountain, which likely extends the range.
Holly Strack, who lives near the entrance to the facility, said friends in the neighbourhood all had the same problem.
"I never thought my garage door was a threat to national security," she said.
In Katrina, the only people that could talk were wearing green uniforms. I think this is a good idea, but you have to laugh at the side effects of the early tests...
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Comments
hey ass, email me.
Are you using your OPFOR email still? I don't have your army one...
Little do they know that we plan to use this information to trap all of them in their garages while we take over the country in our black helicopters.
I wonder what kind of service ribbon they'd come up with for something like that.
Probably just a case of the garage door opener people poaching on assigned military frequencies. We had a similar problem around San Diego with cab driver radios in Tijuana.
Reality is that the new repeater for the Motorola handheld radios is the cause. The garage door openers aren't on the same frequency, but about 60 MHz lower. The garage door recievers are so poorly shielded as to be affected by the APCO P25 waveform used by the USAF and most major metropolitan fire and police departments.
This sounds like an evil plot by Mojo Jojo to take over the world.
Methinks they (the military, that is) should just use a different frequency and leave us garage door openers be.
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Little do they know that we plan to use this information to trap all of them in their garages while we take over the country in our black helicopters.
Oops! Let the cat out of the bag.