Free Republic

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that no one knows what exactly is going on at Westhampton View Court. The garage door openers at all five homes on the court stopped working shortly after Christmas. “It’s a weird, weird thing,” Joe Sullivan told the Post-Dispatch. “And the timing for it all to go haywire for everybody at the same time can’t be coincidence, right?” Garage door companies say interference problems are common at individual homes — they blame what is known as “frequency pollution.” But experts say having the issue extend to multiple homes is just plain weird.

DENVER-- What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working. "It would have been nice not to have to get out of the car and open the door manually," said Dewey Rinehard, pointing out that the outage happened during...

Many automatic garage doors in Ottawa have suddenly, and strangely, stopped working, due to a powerful radio signal that appears to be interfering with the remote controls that open them. J.P. Cleroux of Ram Overhead Door Systems says the phenomenon began last weekend. "It affects a 25-mile radius. That's huge," said Cleroux. Angolan Ambassador Miguel Puna's operation is one of those affected by the problem. He can no longer open his embassy's electronic gate. "Not only in this gate, but even other gates, we are having a lot of problems," said Puna. "This could cause security concerns." Two companies that...