Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Help me find rf interference at home

I have been having an issue at my house with my key fobs not working. I have 5 rigs with fobs and 3 of them will not work in my driveway.....BUT as soon as I'm 100' away they work. This has been a developing problem over the last month.

I've killed the main to the house and the shop....not it. I called the utility company as they installed a smart meter, but they are 4ghz and my remotes are in the 300-430khz area.

Is there a devise thst has the capability to scan this range and help me chase down the interference?

I have it nailed down to something very close to my shop or house. It's certainly not the remotes and my truck will respond from 100 yards away if I'm not at home.

Never heard of that

What kind of vhkls?

NSA/CIA watching you. You traded PM’s with jag recently?

What are the brands of vehicles?its Strange some work and some don’t. Which ones work?

Remove 1 vehicle at a time to eliminate them.

What's new..?

Dodge ram with keyless entry, Dodge ram and lexus with viper alarms.

Nothing that I have done or am aware of.

What's common to the 3 that don't work ?
All Viper alarms ?
Factory, aftermarket ?

I had the same problem with my remotes but it was off and on. Not consistent at all. The across the street neighbors who had a teenage son who was a techie moved and my interference went away.
Have a great day.
Jim

Dodge !

Try a tinfoil hat, the voices in your head are too loud.

A friend of mine was locked out of his house lately when his garage door remotes wouldn't work. Also the keypad for the door was inoperable. The garage door people thought someone in the neighborhood was using a ham radio and caused the issue. Good luck

One is a factory dodge ram 5500 4x4 with the fob start. The other two are viper alarms. One is 2005 vintage the other is 2020ish.

All stopped working at the same time. All will work if I move them 100ish feet away.

If you stand next to the vhkl it won’t work😵‍💫

If I put the remote almost on top of the rf hub in the Ram 5500 it will work. If I go out in the wheat field.....it'll work from 100 yards. The vipers will not respond in the driveway.

The rd hub is located in the middle of the cab under the sliding window and the door must be open and me reaching in for it to respond.

I would reach out to Viper, that's interesting.

Do you have cellular intranet coming from a tower ? New cell tower close, or one that has recently been " upgraded" ?

I'm still sniffing around. Nothing sticks out. The closest tower is 2 miles away.

Do you have any lights in the shop that are Bluetooth? Maybe even a stand alone one above a work bench

Shouldn’t make a schit if ur in Bumfuk Egypt or the surface of tha moon

Dang,

this is serving as a good reminder I should look into getting an older, non-computer, vehicle

high counrty, hope you get it figured out.

just one more thing....................you haven't seen any......................




ALIENS!

lately, have you?

That you, Gus ??? 😜

Nah,

just keeping his memory alive.

I miss the fella,


made more sense at times than some of the yahoos we have around nowadays.

You might try flipping off the main breaker to your house. See if you still have the problem. If you don't, flip all the breakers off, flip the main breaker back on and then flip each breaker back on one at a time to see which breaker is powering the interference.

You’ve killed the power from the house and shop. That would normally eliminate my suspicion, a switching power supply. They are notorious for RFI.

I killed the main to the shop with no change. I need to wait a bit on the house as it's snowing here and there's a ton of load on it today. I've pulled the batteries on the rigs with the viper alarms as they do communicate with the remotes....nothing. my wife did mention that the batteries in the remote was only lasting a few weeks vs months, which tells me there's possibly something close to that freq.

This is bizarre.

Ya ur remotes have different fcc #s between vhkls wierd🤷‍♂️

I'm not a boomer, but you're not wrong. At least once a week I shake my head at something either I personally have to deal with, or watch somebody else deal with, that's not mechanical and the downside to being reliant on such technological idiocy becomes immediately apparent.

What should be simple, and used to be simple, can quickly render otherwise fully functional adults, totally useless.

Fcc id on your fobs will get you an idea of the frequencies involved. I have a dealer installed remote starter and that one operates between 904.0 to 923.6. That one is a frequency hopping device. The door key fob is at 315 mhz. I was able to verify this by firing up a sdrplay RSPdx software defined radio and setting the frequency and watching the waterfall display. The radio grabs a 2-10mhz chunk of spectrum depending on selected sampling rate.

What are the FFC id's on the back of your fobs?

Some systems use a challenge response scheme where there is two way communications, adds more to consider.

If I weren't retired I'd borrow a spectrum analyzer and high gain antenna from work and start sniffing for it. Baring that I think those telling you to start by powering things down is best.

If that doesn't work try googling RF sniffer and the frequency range of your fob. Might be able to find something cheap.

Find an old transistor radio. Turn it on and tune to a non transmitting station. Walk around and see if it buzzes louder at certain places. I had similar problem for years. Tried everything. It was the transformer for the door bell that wa sup in the attic that was intermittenly shortening out.

Friend of mine put LED lights in his machine shop. I want to say it knocked out is AM radio he listened too and something else didn’t work. Seems like he had to put resistors or diodes, something on the lights to fix it.

I worked for a control system company, refineries, chem plants etc. in the early days you couldn’t key a radio lost e to a controller cabinet. Would play hell with control system.

Are there any neighbors nearby? I was actually the cause of my neighbor’s garage door problems a few years ago. Weirdest thing as there is a house in between us and they had no issues!

I bought a dozen mr16 LED bulbs from Amazon to use in my landscape lights. My neighbor started complaining that his garage door keypad would stop working around sunset until 10:00-11pm. Eventually I had a lightbulb moment that those times corresponded to the timer settings on my lights. Sure enough, I turned them off and his stuff worked perfectly. I replaced all the bulbs.

New can lights, i installed some can lights in my garage and the dang things screw up radio signals.

You should live near the R&D center for the USAF, I got PO years ago and traced the crap, until I got to Classified. Apparently the defenders of our country were testing new jamming technology. So now I just, ignore the little hiccups, doors locking, sat reliever stoppages, power flickering, etc. When you do not hear the bird coming, only going away, it is a dead give away.

FCC ID#'s GO43T11T
EZSDE1478
EZSDE17141
the factory Ram isn't listed.

.....and my ford won't respond here either. Our subaru is the lone survivor.

I have one neighbor about 60 yards away and then nothing.

Negative.

You aren't near Fairchild are you?

They aren't up to any spook schiedt up there , are they?

Never heard of this phenomenon

Such can be a real mystery. We once had some analytic instrument at work affecting nothing whatsoever on our grounds. When the unit was on, however, and it was a rarity for us to turn it off, a neighbor down about a mile essentially had no operable radio or TV. It took some serious investigative work by a well-paid consultant and electrician to eliminate the issue eventually requiring an extremely noisy in room transformer dedicated solely to that unit. Cost us about $20K to solve the problem. Same instruments at other facilities were no issue.

Good luck.

There was a guy on Garage Journal that had the same issue with I believe a Dodge or Ram truck, don't remember all the details but one of the local utilities ended up being involved. Try searching GarageJournal.com's Freeparking forum for the issue.

Might be some WiFi thingy you’ll have a power pole nearby?

I couldn't find the first one but substituting the O for a Q found something operating at 315MHZ

The second and third one operates at 433 mhz, those are in the amateur radio band. Most amateurs are not constantly broadcasting though.

433 mhz is also used for telemetry from quad copters and such. I have a couple 433mhz devices for sending info from a weather station I'm building. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3071 Something like that might give you grief.

I'm going to assume your batteries are good. I recently replaced the coin cell in my glucose monitor and still had a low battery alarm, then I looked at the package, no expire date but a 2012 copyright date. Found something newer and it worked. Coin cells best tested with a 300 ohm load.

Any large construction sites nearby?. I had that problem for a while and found that the contractors were using a FRS band that was interfering with my remotes. Once the site was completed everything worked

This was just what I was going to say. An FM radio de-tuned so it picks up random static will also pick up the harmonics of whatever interference you're generating. I've used this back in the day to figure out whether computer hard drives were functioning properly. The old drives put out quite a bit of RF, and you could hear regular recognizable patterns if things were working properly and some strange noises they weren't.

A bad power line transformer can emit RF that might mess with RF sensors. They used to give us a fit in the telecommunications business. You can usually find it with a detuned radio too.

Tracker someone put on yourcar(s).

I'd take one away and have your wife try the others.

Aren't those the frequency used by TPMS wheel sensors, as well?

This guy might have some answers for ya.

https://www.nk7z.net/rfi-now-house-cleaning/

Do you or your neighbor have a cell phone signal booster on the roof? Ours is about 6x8x2", and the instructions had several warnings about rf gain interference.

Any Florescent Lighting around? Ballast can emit EMI interference from anywhere between 10 KHz to 100 MHz.

Phil

Very curious, keep us posted

C305

Any pipe lines next to you? There are often radio systems attached. Usually with directional antennas.

High country did you find what is causing your problems? It would be interesting to know what it was.