The Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station's new radio system is interfering with some residential garage door openers.
Unfortunately for those 18 homeowners in Westminster, Huntington Beach and Long Beach's Island Village area that called the base after figuring out military signals were responsible for their door malfunctions, it is on them and not the U.S. government to make things right.
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As base spokesman Gregg T. Smith explained to the Long Beach Press Telegram's Joe Segura, the Enterprise Land Mobile Radio (ELMR) is being used on a frequency long reserved for use by the Department of Defense. The band had been underutilized, but ELMR is now being used at more military installations.
Meanwhile, some radio-controlled garage door openers, while approved to operate by the Federal Communications Commission, are not licensed to use that same DoD-reserved frequency.
There is a solution, according to Smith: many automatic garage door system makers hawk replacement transmitters that run on frequencies that are not used by the military.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.