What would you do if you came home tonight and your garage door wouldn’t open? Probably what most people do: cuss at it and then go inside for some fresh batteries. But, what if that didn’t work. What if all of a sudden the frequency your trusty opener has been using was claimed by someone else. If you live in Colorado, it may happen soon. It’s already happened to Florida and Pennsylvania residents.
It turns out that the frequency most garage doors operate on is owned by the US military. It always has been, it’s just that they’ve never used it. The Department of Defense is warning Colorado residents that it could happen, but not in the “immediate future”.
What is causing the new need is the demand for radio bandwidth. All the extra recent security requires radio waves for communication.
If the military does decide to use this frequency it would shut down garage door openers. Garage door openers operate at very low power compare to what the military would be broadcasting on, and the openers simply would be ignored. A single radio tower broadcasting at 390 mHz, the shared frequency, could block garage door openers within a 50 mile radius. That is potentially millions of houses.
The solution is to replace a circuit board in your garage door opener so that it uses a different frequency.
Source: 9News.com – U.S. Military may reclaim frequency
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