This afternoon Lori called me and told me CNN just showed that by 2008 most of the U.S. Air Force will be using new radio equipment which operates on the same frequency as the garage door openers. I wrote about this last Fridam you can read my post here. I looked around on CNN.com for the news article, here it is: CNN.com - Military signals may jam garage-door openers - Dec 6, 2004. The article stats, sometimes the signal broadcasted from the equipment is so strong that it affects and in some cases jams the home units. I can tell you, this is very much true, and damn that equipment works on very big distances. Yet, from what I am reading in the article, government officials say the effects should be limited and only around military bases and in about 10 mile radius. The Niagara Air Force base is on the other side of Buffalo and beyond, yet, our remotes cannot operate from as far as they should. How is that limited effects, if it affects a whole city with the size of Buffalo and its suburbs?

I expected to hear some noise in the press and in the tech circles or some announcement from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) before the military took the step of using this type of radios. Even today, after the CNN announcement I have not heard anything on the news. I guess, we will just have to wait till tomorrow before people and companies actually show some kind of reaction to this move.

As I am writing this and reading the article, I see why there have not been any announcements from the FCC.

The garage-door opener frequency at issue — 390 megahertz — has belonged to the military since around 1950. Openers have legally operated at that frequency since at least the early 1980s, Karasek said.

U.S. law allows low-power electronic devices to operate on military frequencies if they don’t cause interference. It was a good frequency for garage-door openers because transmissions can penetrate the doors.

We will have to wait and see how this will develop. In the beginning of the article I read that the simplest solution to the problem is for people to buy a $60.00 peace of equipment which will change the frequency on which the garage door opener operates. For those of you who would like some more information on the subject, you can find it in the article.