Around here once in awhile when an aircraft carrier shows up none of the key fobs work. The Navy always says they have no idea, but the issue is that someone left some electronic counter measures equipment on. These counter measures sweep a particular frequencyband and disable the signals. Chances are there is something transmitting near these houses. I understand it's not going to be aircraft carroer counter measures in Missouri. but something similar is likely the culprit, not the "earth changing frequency."

someone drop me a line when the garage doors start bouncing up and down uncontrollably...you know Poltergeist style

It is likely that such a phenomenon has been artificially induced by parties unknown. From the advent of the universal remote, and the portable signal blocker (carried by power hungry, cell phone fearing persons with money to spare and no respect for thier fellow human being) people have been devising ever cleverer ways of ruining peoples days.

I would have thought that some enterprising, yet thoughtless individual has scratch built a portable device which automatically scrambles the instructions sent from the control unit to the driver unit in the doors, so that the activation code does not match.

Car thieves increasingly use gadgets to read the electronic keys that most modern vehicles use, and steal thier data, so that they can then follow that car, and access it using the chip inside. This gives them access to the vehicles doors, and engine imobiliser codes, which even if the code set is what we call a "rolling code" (which changes according to a randomised configuration every time the key is used), can be usurped using a sufficiently clever program/device.

And to the person who wrote about the dashboard issues when waiting at a stop light... It may be that the particular stop light in question has a malfunctional or poorly focused communications set up. Most signalling these days is on a timer, with remote over rides which can be triggered by persons in a traffic monitoring station, or by emergancy vehicles comming toward them. Perhaps this is interferance caused to the vehicle by a badly structured system of that type?

Wireless gear is prone to mishap, attack from outside, and ill use from its owners, specifically because it has not got a physical element to it. Wireless systems are very rarely as secure as people would like to believe, either from an industry point of veiw, or from the point of veiw of the consumer. Its a fact of life, that as more and more of our day to day life is governed by virtually unsecured sending and reciept of data, so will our lives become less private, less secure against apparantly random incidents of failiure and so on. Sure, you have facebook on the move, but now a person can rob you of all the money you ever owned, without even seeing your face.

I prefer muggers myself, because at least you can make them bleed for your hard earned coin.

I will go with some with a new electronic device in there home that is sending out a signal and blocking one of the pulses from the door openers.
Find the homes affected and the one in the center is the likely culprit

By the way the military IED jammers work the same way by adding extra pulses the confuse the signal to a IED

I know some one that did a tour in the sand box working around the IED jammers and he said no cellphone would work within a 100 feet.

In relative terms, this is in my backyard.

Nothing strange in my neighborhood except around the same time my wife's phone and mine both locked up with the alarms on during the same morning. I couldn't turn in off except by pulling the battery out. Her too!

Different phones, different alarm programs, same carrier.

What are they beaming in STL?

I think you use 315 mhz in the states which is one of the low powered services you don't need a licence for,hence it's shared by lots of other things that share the same or a similar purpose.The remotes are of course coded so it's more likely it's a transmitter stuck on somewhere (intentionally or accidentally),and because they use FM it only needs a very slightly stronger signal to block a marginally weaker one.

Of course it's more likely it actually is a conspiracy as some people would want it to be instigated by the anti obesity campaigners,and is an attempt to give fat people who are too damned lazy to get out of their cars some exercise by waking in some cases a whole 5 metres to open the garage door by hand.

I have to agree with others. Probably someone has a new gadget on the block and it is pumping out a disrupting signal.

Wireless router would indeed be my first thought. Or maybe a baby monitor? LOL.

Maybe someone has a transmitter that is not to regs. Ever had two wireless mice in the same room and had interference? It's the same problem these guys are experiencing. Call the FCC and they will figure out who has the naughty device. Heck, a big enough Ham radio could do it.

Originally posted by wonderboy2402
I have to agree with others. Probably someone has a new gadget on the block and it is pumping out a disrupting signal.

Wireless router would indeed be my first thought. Or maybe a baby monitor? LOL.

The fact that it started right after christmas is the first clue, whatever it is someone got it for a christmas present.

I have a very heavy foot so I not only have a very good radar detector, I have a laser blinding system too, and I would bet that those gizmos could mess with other electronics.

My radar detector is so sensitive new farm tractors with autosteer set it off.

I liked this comment from an electrical engineer who commented on the original article.

garage door openers use Pulse Amplitude Modulation and are required to have a wide input bandwidth so homeland secruity can jam them. Jamming ability is also required of cell phones.

You can prevent this from happening by designing and putting a very narrowband filter on your openers antenna (typically around 315MHz).

So they will jam your garage door openers so you can't flee when tshtf,and jam you phones so you can't facebook and tweeter your friends that you can't get out of your garage!

That is for the ones that don't realize there is a manual release on that opener.

I saw this story on the local news last night. I told you it was near me.

The best guess so far is that either an external opener or a regular push button opener is stuck on and jamming everyone.

Seems logical.

Brunton Avenue, Punt Road. If you want the EXACT spot, let me know and i'll get a street view of it.