Keyless Entries Fail In Las Vegas On Friday

Hoompini-Ting writes "Some accuse area 51, but in any case many folks were stranded when keyless locks failed or their car computers malfunctioned. No technical explanation but I'm sure slashdotters have theories. Similar to the failure in Seattle 3 years ago. See the Las Vegas Review-Journal for more details."

Comments

the article sez

[my sig is bigger tha]

that some Ford, etc. systems use the same frequency as the military, so if it were a military cause, than perhaps only those keyless systems would be affected?

Re:"Similar to the failure in Seattle 3 years ago"

[Jonathan]

Well, this is probably the occurrence:
http://www.thesunlink.com/news/2001/m arch/03302mys tery.html

Unintentional jamming

[NachoDaddy]

Sorry to all you conspiracy theory nuts, this happens all the time. The fact that it made the news surely indicates a slow news day. 30 people in a town of millions called a towing company for a lockout, oooooo! Many keyless entry systems operate around 430MHz. Anytime I transmit on 440MHz while sitting in a parking lot, I set off car alarms and laugh at the people press the crap out of the buttons on their keyless entry systems. Military over the horizon radar is broadband and around 430-440MHz. Anytime the Navy has a big boat in the area, the 440 repeaters are buzzing with radar noise, and low-end keyless entry systems can fail. Granted that Las Vegas doesn't have a whole lot of Navy vessels nearby, but they do have miltary there. On the other hand, it's more fun to blame it on Area 51

Re:More Followup:

[Lifewish]

See if we can compile a list of possibilities. Natural:

• Abnormal solar radiation
• Unexpected other space radiation (supernovae? pulsars?)
• Earthquakes (similar earth-based cockups such as changes in the mantle)

Man-made:

• Nuclear testing
• A lot of batteries being manufactured at the same time
• Secret military/terrorist testing

Just plain unlikely:

• Alien activity

Can anyone think of anything I've missed? Especially in the "man-made" section. Even more useful would be actual data on any of these. Do we have any astrophysicists or geologists posting here? Thanks.

Re:radio jammers?

[tigertiger]

Back in school our physics teachers had a Tesla generator (or Tesla coil), a simple device that creates an electromagnetic signal which can jam a large part of the frequency spectrum. It uses electrical sparks to achieve that.

The field of these thingies is powerful enough to light up a lightbulb over a few feet (if you wire the lighbulb to a reception coil). The story I heard was that the local equivalent of the FCC came in and shut the Tesla generators down. And that was long before cell phones and wireless can openers... I mean car openers.

Would be more fun to have a strong emitter send out all possible code sequences so all the cars in Vegas would unlock...

Re:Wouldn't they all be affected?

[cats-paw]

It would be interesting to see how many of the fob's were older. The SAW's used in FOB's drift in frequency over time. It's possible that they are operating marginally, and so even a little interference would affect performance.

In addition to the usual military radio use which could interfere, ham's could also cause problems even if they are not operating directly on frequency.

If some ham operator doesn't know his power amplifier has decided to start distorting for one reason or another, you could get intermittent distortion which lands @ ~ 430MHz, and again you have a problem.

Or maybe it's just that the batteries were faulty.

It's sort of don't care, except for the truly stupid involvement of homeland security.