Bits from Bill

Technology thoughts leaking from the brain of "Bill Pytlovany"

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Is your Garage Door Stuck Open?

I’ve had fun lately as the door on my garage has been opening and freezing up all by itself. Luckily, I read enough so I had a clue.  I had heard that the radio frequency commonly used by automatic garage door openers wasn’t officially allocated to opener companies.  It was actually assigned to the US Army in 1950.

BilP Studios Garage Door

Apparently, I’m not alone.  While the military hasn’t been using the 380–399 megahertz frequency,  it will be used by new homeland security radios being allocated to 125 bases between now and 2008.  The estimated 50 million affected garage door openers make up about 90% of the installed base.  The FCC allows military frequencies to be used by low power devices as long as they don’t cause interference. Obviously, this wasn’t a problem when the military wasn’t using the frequencies.

So if your garage door starts acting strange don’t be surprised. Before you run out to purchase a new unit you should be able to adjust your remote frequency slightly to fix the problem.

 

 

 

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bill P.
You can let people know that they can adjust the remote
signal by opening up the back of their remote. Simply locate a small retangular box with around
9 or so very small circuts that set in the up or down position.
By changing those around you get
a different signal. There is also
a small box that should be next to
your garage door opener by the end of the chain guide. Inside that box
also should be a small matching circuit box of 9 or so. The positions of each switch have to match exactly as you have changed them on your remote for your unit to work. Most remote door unit's code should change that way or something similiar to that.
Its a good thing to know how to do if some day you find your garage door open and you know for sure it was closed. It happened
to me.

7:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for this article. It helped me to fix my garage door, and prove that it wasn't possessed.

12:01 PM  
Anonymous Garage Door Repair Minneapolis said...

Ya, I've been stuck there before and it wasn't fun. I eventually had to reset the box. I swear that thing was torture. The box that ran the chain was also more triangular than square.

5:23 PM  

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