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U.S. Government Sometimes Jams Keyless Car Locks?
PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that in certain towns (generally near military bases), on certain days (such as the day an aircraft carrier returns to port), keyless car entry systems and remote garage door openers mysteriously fail. While some frustrated motorists blame aliens, the FCC says the jammed frequencies belong to the U.S. military. The good ol' Post even tracks down a government contractor who all-but-confirms the source of the interference."
Mine don't work in the parking lot on the military base I work on, but the work fine at home.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
Too bad part 15 of the FCC's guidelines can't apply. The whole "may not cause harmful interference" section might have been nice. My dad parked on a Navy base with his keyless entry-equipped Oldsmobile for a few years up in Washington. Whatever they had running was so strong, it completely fried the system.
I had a sucky sig.
Dampening field?
I think you have been watching to much trek.
They are simply using their assigned frequencies...
The problem is that some guys thought they were smart assigning a frequency band used by others (like military or HAMs) for unlicensed use.
(Same is happening at 2.4GHz)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I used to work with an engineer who was a former air force tech on the Looking Glass. The Looking Glass missions were a group of USAF command/control aircraft that was always airborne to provide a redundant facility to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the unlikely event SAC ceased to exist from a USSR strike.
He explained on several occasions that one of their amusements was lowering a long antenna and jamming garage door frequencies and other civilian applications (e.g. keyless door locks). I couldn't imagine why the air force would want to interfere with garage doors and he never had a good explanation other than they were told to do that and the crew always found it amusing.
Urban legend? Looking Glass crew tall tale told to amuse their friends? Who knows, but they certainly had the ability to try and lord knows many friends have had their garage doors open by themselves in the middle of the night.
I happen to work at a base where the US Army Communications Electronics Command (CECOM) is headquartered. I have a keyless entry. So do many of the thousands of other people who work there. Never heard of a keyless entry problem.
Weird.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
At my last base, one day I was riding in a coworker's car on the way to our office. The road there wraps around a runway. His radar detector goes apeshit when going past there. Possibly due to ILS radio waves.
The cops at the gate don't like to see radar detectors anyway, so it was usually best to keep it off the dash after you passed through, as it was useless.
On the other hand, keyless remotes didn't pose too much of a problem.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
A few years ago a US ship visited my hometown Hobart/Ausralia and garage door remotes all over the city stopped working. The US Navy apologised.
Does it go on forever?
...people don't interfere with it per se. Thieves armed with a laptop will nab your opener code at a gas station, and then follow you to a hotel or wherever your destination is. They steal the car at night, and are long gone with 3-4 hours head start. They're nice and useful, I'm sure, but not always appropriate.
webpage
My Dad was in the Navy years and years ago and apparently the radar on aircraft carriers is powerful enough to knock birds out of the air at a few hundred feet. One time a bunch of his repair crew buddies were doing work on one of these, so they turned it off and took out the fuses to ensure that it would not get turned on. While they're up working on the dish some guy comes along, sees it's not working and decides to put the fuses back in and turn it on. The guys are up there when it slowly starts to turn -- one of them jumps and slides down off the platform, and the other guy ducks the dish when it swings around and slides down after. I don't know what happened after that, but I bet the guy that put the fuses back in did not have a great time.
This exact same thing happens at a local Eckerd drugstore here in NY. Anywhere in the parking lot you are unable to use your keyless entry to unlock your car. You can be inches away and it just does not work for anyone, ever.
Although once your inside the car it will usually work, since your right on top of the receiver. It probably has something to do with Eckerd transmitting store information to a national databse or something.
One of those shows that copy MTV's Punk'd concept did a thing like this with retail CB walkie-talkies. They went to one of the big parking lots downtown and when a car's owner approached his vehicle, they just hit the speak button on the CB radio and held it down. Then, when the car wouldn't open, they'd send a fake locksmith in who'd pretend to mess with the lock for a while, eventually give up and then offer to smash in one of the windows.
In most cases, that one walkie-talkie was enough to "jam" the keyless entry system. The only cars it failed to work on were Mercedes, BMW and IIRC Audi models (maybe imports use a different frequeny - I dunno).
Surprisingly, most of the people couldn't seem to figure out how to get in their cars without the remote (well, at least, of those people they showed). I sometimes wonder how those people manage to put their pants on in the morning.
I used to work in a lab where we did some (non-military, non-secret) radio work and it would sometimes cause problems in the car park. The problem seems to be that the receivers in the cars are built "on the cheap" using ceramic resonators rather than quartz crystals, so they are not very selective. That is, rather than being sensitive only to the frequency that the remote is transmitting on, they are also sensitive to adjacent (and not so adjacent) frequencies. They could easily be swamped by a powerful transmitter several MHz away, whereas a better-designed receiver would be imune. So I blame the remote manufacturers.
The particular frequencies used depend on where in the world you are; the U.S. uses one set and the rest of the world uses another. Here in the "rest of the world" most remotes operate at 433 MHz. This is not far from TV frequencies - ever find your car remote doesn't work if you're parked next to a TV transmitter? Newer systems will probably be using 868 MHz (rest of world) or 913 (U.S.); this bit of the spectrum is better regulated and it would be difficult to get away with not using a crystal-based receiver. So hopefully these problems will go away.
Intent doesn't really matter in the RF relm. If you're radiating whether you know it or not you're reponsible for keeping your signal source within it's authorized bounds. Signal splash to the point that it exceeds the unlicensed power limit on any band is illegal... and there's no exceptions to that.
Using a walkie talkie in a car lot allows
you to block many peoples remote central
locking. A few people dont notice their
car doesnt lock. Then when they are in the
markets our theif is their car doing away with
their valuables
easy..
And for those of us who have disable their
locks on thei cars. Spare remote and batteries
hidden deep under the car and battery
terminal extensions hanging out below the car
Anyone remember seatbelt interlocks? Basically, the car wouldn't start until the seatbelt was fastened. A successful lawsuit by a woman who was raped because she was unable to start her car to flee her attacker put an end to the technology. Just wait for the first person raped, robbed, or otherwise ruined because their car wouldn't permit them entrance, or because their house was afire and the children couldn't exit through the garage. Laws of unintended consequences and practices of the unthinking + wronged party = lawsuit.
It's the American way.
The problem is that some guys thought they were smart assigning a frequency band used by others for unlicensed use
It could be that most if not all frequencies have been assigned. And these guys had a list of frequencies like this:
Police Band
Citizens Band
Radio Broadcasts
Television Broadcasts
Military/Governemnt
Note: This is fabricated list and no actual research went into its construction
Out of a list like that the one that's least likely to present a problem to the largest number of customers would be military. There's not a military base in every city, but there probably are regular broadcasts that could interfere on the others.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
My cars have those keyless entry things.
None of you will believe me, anyways.
One day, I parked near a friends house, around Southport/Addison (chicago). I was (at the time) driving a 1998 Black Sebring.
When I came back to pickup my car, there was a white saturn in front of it.
Push unlock. The headlights, and the horn on both cars flash/beep.
Weird.
Push lock. The headlights, and the horn on both flash/beep twice.
Weird.
Repeat.
Wow... It kept working.....
What are the chances against that? 80 billion to 1?
Craziness..
Why can't I win the lotto, instead?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Sounds similar to mine...I have a 2004 Toyota Prius hybrid. The "key" is just a transmitter, in fact you don't ever have to take it out of your pocket or even touch it to unlock and start the car. However, after being left idle for 2 days, the car's computer goes into sleep mode to conserve battery power. If that happens, the smart entry and start won't work. The key transmitter does have an actual mechanical key that can be used to unlock the door in that situation, then you place the transmitter in a slot in the dashboard (where the ignition key would be if there was one) to wake the computer back up.
I have fun with this one - One person who visits a neighbor has a car that trips the alarm is you transmit on 144.390 Mhz - Other hams will know what this frequency is - APRS (Automatic Position (or Packet) Reporting System) - I run an APRS station at home - every few minutes it digipeats some inbound packet, and off goes the guys alarm. Luckly, the guy turns out to be another HAM! We worked and fixed that one. Only happened if he parked right in from of my house - 2 houses away stopped the problem
I've also seen it happen in parking lots - I'll key my radio, and someone's alarm will go off - just a bad alarm setup - I've had MY signal checked, and I'm running perfectly legal
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Having seen the effect of a radar sweep of a dutch frigate while in the harbour i think you can forget about shielding for this. (No, it is not allowed to use the ships main radar while in the harbour. But sometimes it is done by some asshole anyway). These thing are insanely powerfull. Crt's crumble, radio's yank, computers reset etc. Granted this was at about 500 meter from the ship but designing so thus has no effect will be costly. Most likely to costly for door openers
If you're getting interference with a keyless entry device at very short range, the interference source is probably nearby. Very nearby, like tens of meters. There's an inverse square law, remember. Somebody in that parking lot has something that's emitting.
Sure, an Aegis battlecruser could point its phased array radar in your direction, hold the beam stationary. and send a few megawatts down a narrow beam out to the horizon, but that's unlikely. Few smaller radars have that kind of power, directionality, and steerability. You still have to have near line of sight, anyway.
Get a directional antenna and a signal strength meter, and you'll find the source.
Physical locks vary a lot, not just by the model but from year to year.
In the 88 to 89 Toyota trucks, the vast majority of them could be opened with a Toyota key with all notches cut about 1/32nd inch deep.
Around this time, you could get a new key to fit your Volvo, Mazda or Saab by giving the dealer the last 3 digits of the VIN, visable through the windshield. Some dealers checked to see if the requestor actually owned the car, most didn't.
Mustangs around '79 had a lot of different ignition keys, but only half a dozen or so trunk keys.
I don't remember which vehicle it was, but there was one make and model year about 1990 where your key would match 1 out of every 8 such cars. Most mechanicallly keyed cars today are more in the range of 1 in 200 or better, but even that doesn't sound very reliable.
Most electronic keys use some variant on a pseudo-random generation approach. In a typical design 256 codes are sent each time, and a new one generated by boxes in the car and installed in the key device as the oldest one is dropped. That way, if little Jimmy plays star trek with daddy's new electronic key, he has to phaser his buddies 256 times, out of reach of the car, before the key and the in-car chip no longer have a code in common. If they still share at least one code, they will resync withhout a service call. 256 common codes out of several trillion possible is still very good overall odds.
Who is John Cabal?