West Valley garage door frequencies mysteriously jammed

This is interesting. Several residents in west Phoenix, Arizona are suddenly having problems with their garage doors. Their remotes won't work or the doors will open and close all by themselves. Is the military to blame?

According to the report, many garage door openers use a 390 megahertz (MHz) frequency which is right in the middle of the authorized spectrum range for the Department of Defense.

For decades, the DOD has used 380 MHz to 399.9 MHz in the electronic spectrum but just a few years ago, government agencies were required to use new Land Mobile Radios which would operate on that designated frequency range. The radios were sent to installations across the country.

Luke Air Force Base is located in west Phoenix near where the neighbors having the problems live. This only recently started happening so it makes me wonder why the Department of Defense is suddenly cranking up their activity around here.

I'd like to hear other's thoughts on the matter.

Source

This has happened before. I found two threads on it, but for some reason I cannot open the first page. However here's a post with a discovery of the cause that you might find interesting.

reply to post by Shadoefax


There were 125 bases that were going to get radios that would operate between
380 and 400, but the military wouldn't say which bases were getting said radios.

I read the article and my question is: why isn't this happening everywhere if that were the case? I mean people in Phoenix, Arizona don't have "special" garage doors do they? I think there is more to this and as per usual a quick band-aide excuse was taped over it. Maybe something unknown flying overhead holds the key...or the frequency in this case.

reply to post by Staroth


Either that or it's the radio..

No conspiracy here. It's been happening for a while


m.lvsun.com...

I'm not in Arizona but my garage door has been behaving this way. Opening on its own. Kind of dangerous when I don't always lock the door into the house.
My remote won't work properly. I don't live near any AFB's though. I'm gonna get it looked at.

Could it be those smart meters causing it? Ever since I got one of those several things act up.

From my own personal experience... the F-16, when properly equipped... well, lets just say that was one of the best ass-chewings I ever got... I got bored while in the cockpit running func. checks one night and started playing with stuff OOPS. Was a bit more than a few garage doors though...

(They also get really upset when you "hot tune" a live AIM-120 missile... but that's a totally different story...)

violet
I'm not in Arizona but my garage door has been behaving this way. Opening on its own. Kind of dangerous when I don't always lock the door into the house.
My remote won't work properly. I don't live near any AFB's though. I'm gonna get it looked at.

Could it be those smart meters causing it? Ever since I got one of those several things act up.

My smart meter is L-band, basically much higher in frequency. But I don't know about all smart meters.

The radios in remote controls have very little filtering. They are cheap. If there is interference, it usually if not universally fails in the direction of not working. This is because for a remote to work, it needs to be decoded, and the interference effects the ability to decode the signal.

I was exploring a junked truck near the NTTR. I always lock my doors even if in the middle of the desert because camo dudes are known to try your locks. Upon returning to my car, there was so much interference that I could barely open the door electronically until I was right next to it.

Incidentally, every time I find a junker in the desert, it has a habit of disappearing if I mention the location. I turned one junker into a geocache, and soon the vehicle was gone. The next junker I found, I kept the location off the internet, but did tell a few people in Rachel about it. Soon it was gone.

Back to the ELMR radios, the NTTR has three such systems. No activity on them that I ever detected. Because they go up near air force bases, the FAA is often involved, so you can trace the location of the transmitters via the paperwork filed with the FAA for the associated towers. Basically the federal/military frequencies are a secret to some degree. Dating back to the Reagan administration, the IRAC (frequency database) became restricted. Just how restricted is often argued. I think it only has FOUO status, which means you can FOIA specific frequencies, but in practice, the requests are rejected. [The document containing all frequencies will never be given to the public.] But the tower locations have no such protection, so you can tell which bases have ELMR.

ELMR blog

ELMR

reply to post by Shadoefax


I recall a story about a year ago,some guy had a GPS blocker device that he used in a company car,so they couldn't track him wasting time.His route took him near an airport,and it messed up the tower/planes signal.They finally tracked it down using the highway cameras! Maybe some type of device,a celphone blocker,someones radar detector,or your terrorist neighbor's nuclear device.

reply to post by blkcwbyhat


That was at Newark airport, they were testing out a new system called Smartpath when this guy drove nearby with his gps jammer.

Stealthbomber
reply to post by Shadoefax

 

There were 125 bases that were going to get radios that would operate between
380 and 400, but the military wouldn't say which bases were getting said radios.

This is worded kind of funny. They just don't send out radios. All the ELMR systems use repeaters, specifically P25. So each system is engineered. Terrain is analyzed via computer program to determine where the repeater or network of repeaters is to be set up. The frequencies used need to be coordinated so other system in the same band are not effected. This all goes out to bid on fbo.gov, which is where I get my information on upcoming systems.

Once everything is engineered, the system is built and the handheld/mobile radios are purchased.

reply to post by gariac


Thanks for your reply.
I'm on the west coast of Canada, near the US Border though. Sumas border crossing into Washington state.

I've wondered if a neighbour has something that is interfering.

reply to post by violet


Near borders, the NTIA/FCC is much more willing to spill frequencies since they need to be coordinated between countries.

Getting all the frequencies used on a P25 system isn't all that hard, even without someone spilling the beans. The repeater control channel is always on. That frequency comes for free. Then you connect the scanner to software to decode the rest of the system. The web page I had linked to is just a compilation of such data submitted by various people.

This sort of thing happens near where I live quite frequently, but usually it includes the electronic door openers for cars as well. Curiously, this usually happens when an aircraft carrier has just entered port. There's no relationship between the two, though.

The Navy says so.

schuyler
This sort of thing happens near where I live quite frequently, but usually it includes the electronic door openers for cars as well. Curiously, this usually happens when an aircraft carrier has just entered port. There's no relationship between the two, though.

The Navy says so.

The Navy has repeaters on their ships. Usually they are running over radiax (leaky coax). But it wouldn't surprise me if they can hook up to the 380MNz ELMR from a carrier.

reply to post by schuyler


A couple of related stories:

www.kitsapsun.com...

pugetsoundblogs.com...

Last year was riding my motorcycle from central cal to salt lake ,
and we were passing through Fallon NAS, and through the bombing range east of there, I had intermittent radio traffic on my Bluetooth headset/intercom.
You could tell it was military traffic, and you would only catch a few seconds of voice then a couple seconds of static. It quit once were were a couple miles from the bases.

punkinworks10
Last year was riding my motorcycle from central cal to salt lake ,
and we were passing through Fallon NAS, and through the bombing range east of there, I had intermittent radio traffic on my Bluetooth headset/intercom.
You could tell it was military traffic, and you would only catch a few seconds of voice then a couple seconds of static. It quit once were were a couple miles from the bases.

The military doesn't use bluetooth. Well not that I know of. But aircraft use AM. It is really easy for AM signals to leak into poorly shielded electronics and get demodulated.

The whole purpose of AM is that the demodulator is cheap. All you need is a diode and capacitor.

It was probably some Commo guy who left an RF jammer on after he tested it. its really non news

I just so happen to work in the garage door business in the Phoenix area, mostly in the East Valley areas, but I do make it over to the west side on occasion. One of the big things is that most of the garage door openers in this area are Chamberlain products (Craftsman, Liftmaster, Chamberlain, some Wayne Dalton units), which happened to operate at 390 MHz. Interference in the 380-400 MHz range is bound to cause issues for these openers. There are a couple of options to fix this kind of issue, one of them being that there was a logic board for some of the units which ran off a remote that operates at 433 MHz (identified by a blue "learn" button), or they had just recently come out with a new wall control called the 888LM, which uses a remote that operates at an entirely new frequency, which seems to have gotten rid of a lot of the interference issues in my experiences. Also, there is a possibility of failing receivers in the logic boards, but that is more common on the boards with a red "learn" button. I am constantly replacing those particular boards, especially on the 1/3 HP chain drives. It is pretty unlikely that all of the receivers are failing at the same time, so I would be putting my guess on interference. There are actually neighborhoods that are near airports, that used to have a lot of garage doors start opening when planes would fly overhead, from stories that I have been told by a former coworker. I wouldn't chalk it up to any kind of conspiracy in this particular case, most likely just interference.

The flat black, unmarked Apache's flying over my apartment all the time might be a different story.