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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."
first po#@)(^*ESDHLKS&^$#HLFSDIHF
[JAMMED]
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
There is only a select number of frequencies we can access and use, this was bound to happen.
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
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
I hear you get good prices when buying tin foil in large orders. I'd probably need that for the garage door.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
enter your car, and start it with just the key, the government may be to blame, but you need to be slapped.
Horse and buggy remains unaffected by such measures.
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.
This reminds me of that movie Minority Report...
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.
Jamming is a deliberate "denial of service" attack in the RF relm. Interference is the unintentional degradation or stoppage of service.
When 2 ethernet NIC's transmit at the same time in normal operation we don't call it jamming. I doubt that what the government is doing is intentional.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
"But unlike other more powerful radio signals, keyless entry remotes are not licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. They are allowed to operate on frequencies used by licensed customers as long as their signals are sufficiently weak and don't interfere with others. But because of this outlaw status, their own signals can be jeopardized." Tough. Get licensed, or have a working backup system that doesn't depend on radio. I honestly don't see the issue here. The situation isn't likely to change, so the unlicensed folk will have to work around it. Use spread-spectrum at low power or frequency hopping to get around this. -C
This will be in Michael Moore's next film. </satire>
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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?
for that purpose deserves to be bitch-slapped.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
...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 topic has already been covered here.
Radar Tech: "Sir. The car keys, sir. They appear to be... jammed."
Dark Helmet: "Jammed? Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry. Lone Starr!"
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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.
Tin-foil key fob covers... patent pending.
Any FCC Class A or Class B device must accept the possibility of harmful radio interference. If said devices were sensitive to radio transmissions on a particular frequency, and that frequency was delineated for that purpose, there's a possibility of it being a problem.
That being said? I find it highly unlikely that a critical device like that would be left to "We can just sneak along on any frequency we want, because we put out less than 1w"
Weapons of Mass Analysis
This is one of the reasons medical devices have to go through some rigorous testing and use approved frequencies. Even so, mistakes do occur.
When a pacemaker fails, it tends to get noticed. Early pacemakers had trouble with improperly shielded microwave ovens - mostly because the pacemaker itself was improperly shielded. Pacemakers that used a magnetic sensor for the on/off function ran into trouble if a strong magnet was waved over the patient's chest. Some of the early AV sequential pacemakers with the ability to change heart rate based on activity sensors would, if incorrectly programmed, suddenly throw the patient into an artificial 2nd degree heart block when the patient's heart rate exceeded a specific amount.
Urban legends contribute to percieved problems. Notice all the hospitals with "No Cell Phone" signs. Then notice all the cell phones in use by the doctors and the EMS personnel walking around with Handi-Talkies. Oops....
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
I hear the military is why Windows keeps crashing too. At least, that's what my Microsoft Rep just told me.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
RTFA. They are allowed to use those frequencies so long as the transmitter (in this case the keyfob) is so low powered that it shouldn't interfere with the licenced equipment.
Perhaps this might be a good time to read the article. Particularly the bit about how low power transmissions aren't regulated by the FCC.
Take notes. There will be an exam at the end.
IIRC, the key-fobs are part 15 devices. This means they use very low power and are allowed to operate so long as they don't cause interfearance to the licensed users of the spectrum. The flip side is that part 15 devices have no protection from interfearing signals from licensed users: Such as when the local military transmitter prevents your keyless-entry system from working.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
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.
Keerap in a bucket. Just where do you think radars are located? You think the aliens are floating them aloft for us? UN black helicopters? Or maybe the AF and navy pilots spend all day aiming their radars at the ground, yeh that's the ticket.
Yah right. Only the military has powerful radars. Airliners are tracked across country by emissions from illegal cell phone usage. The minute they make cell phones legal on airplanes, the thrill will be gone and there will be no way to track airliners because only the military has powerful radars.
And weather radar, gosh, thank hevaens the military shares that powerful technology with us mere civilians.
Flamebait -55.
Infuriate left and right
You don't need to delve into urban legend. Back in 1998, a dozen wireless heart monitors went offline at a major Dallas-area hospital when WFAA-TV turned on its HDTV transmitter for the first time.
I write in my journal
that went bezerk for almost 48 hours. It worked perfectly until out of the blue, the alarm would sound, doors would lock and unlock every second, and if I shut it off, it would turn itself on again a second later. The car was parked in my parents driveway at the time. I had to disconnect the battery to shut the damned thing off. I tried it again 24 hours later, same problem. The day after that, the problem went away, never reappeared.
Co-incidentally, there was an airshow on in town during this time. When the airshow ended, so did the problems. I wonder what kind of super radar they were using that had this effect.
My rights don't need management.
Might I suggest you work on your cause-and-effect a bit more?
... well, OK, welcome to Slashdot!
I have three rocks in my garden. All of them are red. None have been stolen. Ergo, red rocks cannot be stolen.
See how stupid it sounds? Dude - the top five cars on that list are also the TOP FIVE most common cars in the U.S. If you can establish a relationship between the theft rates of similarly-equipped cars, where the only variable is RFID or not, then you've got a case and you are welcome to tell us all about it. If you just wanna spout uneducated shit...
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Somewhere within the remote is an actual metal key for use when the electronics aren't working . There should be a button that flips it out or a hidden compartment that you can pull it out of. Look for extra seams on the sides.
This space intentionally left blank.
Actually, Mercedes-Benz is currently disposing of traditional flat keys. They are gradually being replaced by an IR/RF "SmartKey." As of 2004, the E-Class ships only with a flat "valet key" that independently locks the glovebox.
Do you like German cars?
The cause of the problem is rather clear... keyless systems are Part 15-compliant flea power devices, and their makers have decided to pick radio frequencies used by the military. Since those frequencies are rarely used in most civilian areas, that bandwidth is usually in the clear. However, when a military ship is coming home, that's the frequency band most likely to be used to communicate with the base, and that's where the trouble starts...
Why don't the car people put their systems on 900mHz, 2.4GHz, or 5.8GHz with the rest of the consumer device universe? They might have to deal with occasional interference from other things, but they can be assured that nobody will ever come in with a high-wattage use of that space that'll blow them out of the water.
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
Here's a scary story:
I worked at a branch of the military for a while. During one of the status reports, I heard this story:
Two repair techs lock out the machine they're working on with padlocks and put the keys in their respective pockets. Once they're done the repair, they go to turn the lockout off, and...
"What the [pretty flowers]? The [fluffy bunnies] padlocks are [cute kitten] missing!"
They searched the ship, and they found a drawer full of bent, broken, and damaged padlocks. It didn't belong to anyone, but it was a real WTF moment. Not only did someone ignore the lockout routine, but the guy pried open the padlocks to turn the locked out machine on.
They never found out who did it.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Just the opposite; it means shielding is your only recourse.
In other words, "If you don't like it, lump it" (I think that's how the old saying goes), or "this is the world's smallest violin...", but in legalese.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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 was assuming it was more narrow band interference. But given that several classes of devices are affected, it must be wider. The other thing this article seems to be is heavy into blaming the military. How about blaming the car manufacturers for producing an unreliable technology with no backups and depending on the military to only occasionally encroach on these frequencies? -C
That rule was instituted after a number of W callsigns were issued to stations west of the Mississippi.
The stations already holding W callsigns were allowed to keep them. Dallas has at least two:
WFAA
WRR
Actually, 433 MHz is in a band allocated to amateur radio (HAM radio) and radiolocation (radar and positioning equipment).
Unlicensed lowpower devices are allowed to use a small part of this band, but they have to accept interference from the other services.
Many radio amateurs are allowed to output about 100 Watts at this frequency, which of course completely swamps the milliwatt signal of the car keys.
The radio location service can output megawatts of pulse power.
The frequency is also used by many other lowpower wireless devices. Interferences is very often a problem. Don't buy products using this technology.
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.
We complain - audi says it's not their fault, City says it's not their problem.
When I grow an extra head from the radiation I will go to the office of the Sutro Tower people and eat one of their faces.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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?