Fort Detrick Radio System Jams Remote Garage Doors

WTOP Radio Network ^ | 27 FEB 2005 | The Associated Press

[Denver Ditdat]

FREDERICK, Md. - A new radio system at Fort Detrick will improve communication with the Pentagon. The downside: some people may have to open their garage doors the old-fashioned way.

The Land Mobile Radio system will allow Fort Detrick and 10 other Army installations in the Washington region to communicate with the Pentagon and civilian emergency personnel by hand-held radios.

In a suburban sacrifice to emergency preparedness, Frederick residents could experience a rash of dead door openers in coming days, as the Army's Fort Detrick begins using a new radio system linking local and federal government emergency personnel.

The new system uses a frequency that has been owned by the military for decades but used only by a couple of consumer devices, including garage door openers.

Testing of the system has generated a dozen calls to Fort Detrick from residents with problems, and when the system begins operating on 3,000 military properties across the country in coming months, hundreds more complaints may follow.

"I think the Army ought to buy us a new opener or pay for a converter," Marty Kreps told The Washington Post.

"If the government was fair, they'd give us a tax deduction," Michael Foster said.

Negative, the Army says.

"This frequency belongs to the military," said Michael J. Batt, telecommunications engineer and frequency manager at Fort Detrick, who is coordinating the radio system rollout. "I'd rather know Frederick County has a radio system it can rely on in an emergency and have to walk a few feet to open my garage."

In May, residents near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida had problems with their garage door openers while the base was testing its land mobile system. In November, Fort Detrick finished work on a 150-foot radio tower, which juts above a grove of satellite dishes about a mile from the entrance to North Crossing. In mid-January, Detrick began testing the radios.

That was about the same time Darlene Foster returned from the Safeway to find her garage door immobile. And the same week, Marty and George Kreps learned that to open their garage, Marty Kreps said, "you have to pull up to the door like you're going to run into it."

Surfing the Internet, George Kreps learned that this was a known problem with two possible solutions: "Either you get a $60 kit" to change the frequency "or you spend $150 on a whole new system."

[Eaker]

Git a room you two!

[coloradan]

Bumping the banglist for the obvious connections to RF-ID'd so-called "smart"-guns ... Dang, the local government office jammed all of them during that last time of unrest. Oh well, too bad.

[bikerman]

Am not sure about the very new ones but most garage door openers have slide switches on the back end of the opener near the hanging wire and also inside the remote hand unit to change the frequency their are thousands of combinations to chose from check your owners manual.