RF interference or Jamming

[MournBlade]

A friend of my wifes is having problems with her keyless car and her garage door openers as is her direct neighbor.
Is there a company in Canada that will come out and find out if its just a matter of signal overload or jamming?
Thanks

[Chromatix]

You might want to ask your local amateur radio group for advice. They might have a gadget lying around that can figure it out, and they would know who to call for a more official investigation.

[Sandman]

Ditto what Chromatix says. Ask the local hams for help. You want a group that specializes in Radio Direction Finding. What might be happening is that there might be a new radar installation that is jamming. There currently is an instance in Southern CT (in the states) in which a Navy transmitter is causing all sorts of trouble with garage door openers.

[emax4]

Depending on the garage door, there may be a set of DIP switches on the transmitter on the controller and the receiver inside the garage. If both are set to the same sequence of switches (ex. up-down-down-up-up-down-down) but the sequence is set differently to what it is now, that might fix one problem.

[MournBlade]

It was all working fine then about 3 weeks ago their garage door and their neighbors stopped working at the same time.
Neither of them had changed anything at that time and changing setting also did nothing.
Also the car starts fine everywhere but in their driveway.
Its a 3 month old luxury car and the dealers looked at it its fine - the key is fine and trying reset procedures for the key in the driveway also did nothing.
I'm in the process of trying to hunt down a ham group or somebody who can find where the jamming is coming from.
They do live on a river near a great lake it might be radar interference or something like that.

[Andara Bledin]

Your neighbors are most likely being hit with interference by a portable radio system deployment, most likely by the military, close to the neighborhood. This sort of thing has been a known issue for about a decade, now, and while the garage door issue is pretty well-documented, the care remote/ignition issue seems to be a newer problem.

Apparently, the FCC has allocated certain ranges to military use, but smaller applications, such as garage doors and other remote entry devices will often use those ranges so that they have a wider available spectrum to use across models. It's not illegal to do so, but it can open customers up to this sort of issue.

This hit a large enough area of Ottawa in 2005 to get it mentioned on Wikipedia in the article about Land Mobile Radio Systems.

For garage doors, you should be able to get a retrofit kit or reset the unit and remote so that they use a frequency that isn't in the range of interference. I'm afraid I'm at a loss as to what to do about the car.

The range is reported to be about 10 miles, but that is data from 7 years ago, so it's quite possible that range has grown.

Here's a link to an article that might provide some information (but no solution):
Inside FCC Part 15 and Canada's Corresponding Standards

^-.-^

[Gizmo]

There was a similar instance in the UK that about 3-4 roads in a city having the same problem and it was something to do with a amateur something or other... (wish I could find the article!)... I think it might have been an amateur radio station or something?