So yesterday I noticed my built in garage door opener in my car would not work. 7 year old car, maybe it just died. So i tried the remote that came with the garage door, didnt work unless I was inside the garage. Outside the garage it doesnt work. I called garage door company and was told Verizon is known to test their towers in the 315 megahertz range and that kills the remotes. 5 of my neighbors said theirs stopped working too. So I called verizon, and told them to stop the madness. They told me to make a claim. Verizon just put up a new tower less than a mile from my house.

Yeah I could go thru the front door, open garage, park car, etc...... but Im lazy.

What can I do to boost my signal??

2/1/2011 6:38:37 PM

do a wired remote and setup a button on a post in your drive way like a pay parking lot

2/1/2011 6:51:19 PM

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r17625885-fiosgarage-door-problem

Seems like Verizon would have fixed this shit by now. I can't imagine a piece of modern commercial electronics so fucking shitty that they can't keep switching noise from being injected back into the supply.

I didn't read all that thread, just down to where the guy said he put a scope on the line and saw the square wave and was picking up activity with an AM radio.

2/1/2011 6:51:30 PM

The garage door guy did say Verizon Fios. I automatically thought Verizon wireless. Is there a difference? I have never had verizon services for anything

2/1/2011 7:07:00 PM

Fios is their fiber network.

edit: Just something to throw out there -- if the antennas on cell towers killed garage door openers there would be some kind of nation-wide epidemic of garage door openers not working correctly.

[Edited on February 1, 2011 at 7:19 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2011 7:08:57 PM

From what I was told, cell phone towers during their testing phase, operate in the same signal range as openers. Something about testing the speed of the tower, but not interfering with current cell phones.

2/1/2011 7:33:54 PM

Aluminum foil hats garage door opener condoms

2/1/2011 8:00:30 PM

I have to throw up the Bull Shit flag...
I doubt that Verizon "tests" their cell towers on that frequency. In fact, it is down right retarded. The antennas and radios can't just switch base frequencies. It doesn't work like that. They can change slightly, but not 315 to 800 mhz. Antennas are fine tuned for very specific frequencies. It would do no good to test in the 315 range if they are going to broadcast in a different frequency.

The cost of hanging and adjusting and tuning an antennas is very expensive. My bet is they do everything in house or on a private RF range. In many cases, the cost of an antennas is < $4000. In Verizon's case < $1500 (for an omni). The cost to hang one, adjust and fine tune it can be >$20K per.

To my knowledge, Verizon doesn't own or operate any spectrum in the 300 MHz.
The FCC has very strict rules on where and what frequency someone can broadcast.

You may have someone on your street with a bogus garage opener or something like that. I would bet good $ that its not Verizon.

2/1/2011 10:30:14 PM

cell phone networks generally operate at significantly higher frequencies than low-power transmitters like garage door openers. being higher, it wouldn't even be a harmonic or anything interfering with you.

i'd be interested to find out more about this, but i think the idea that the cell phone tower is interfering with your garage door opener might be a dubious proposition.

not to mention that a tower a mile away might have trouble overwhelming a link distance of just a few dozen feet in the case of your door opener remote.

[Edited on February 1, 2011 at 11:50 PM. Reason : prob easy to confirm with a spec-an. don't know if VZ will send anyone out with that gear, though.]

^ yep

[Edited on February 1, 2011 at 11:51 PM. Reason : because it may be unnecessary. ]

2/1/2011 11:46:22 PM

Try replacing the battery...?

2/2/2011 12:02:02 AM

Not sure if you are in Raleigh but VZW is upgrading the towers around here in preperation for 4G LTE and also to merge the Alltel assets with the existing network.

2/2/2011 1:46:30 AM

5 neighbors openers stopped working, all on the same day. I put foil around the opener and on the little wire antenna and it seems to have fixed the problem. My remotes work from the street, but still dont have the range they had 3 days ago without the foil.

2/2/2011 8:22:52 AM

Oh yeah, something is interfering. Your range has decreased due to the lower signal to noise ratio. Your link distance has to be closer to work through the interference.

I'm just not convinced that it's a cell tower.

[Edited on February 2, 2011 at 9:06 AM. Reason : ]

2/2/2011 9:05:34 AM

Aluminum foil hats garage door opener condoms

Indeed

2/2/2011 9:52:04 AM

Quote :

"The cost of hanging and adjusting and tuning an antennas is very expensive. My bet is they do everything in house or on a private RF range. In many cases, the cost of an antennas is < $4000. In Verizon's case < $1500 (for an omni). The cost to hang one, adjust and fine tune it can be >$20K per. "

I work at an engineering firm that has an installation team for cell antennas, and I can confirm this is (mostly) true. That price is usually for installing multiple antennas at a rad center rather than just one antenna.

2/2/2011 10:38:25 AM

New HAARP tower?

2/2/2011 10:53:37 AM