[tzs]

> Some thought that the Navy’s new million-watt radio transmitter at Jim Creek near Arlington was [absurd theory deleted]

There actually is a problem some Washington residents occasionally have from powerful navy transmitters.

Every so often in Bremerton many garage door opener remotes and car keyless entry systems become very unreliable for a few days to a week or two. This generally corresponds to when aircraft carriers visit the Bremerton naval shipyard.

There are often multiple kinds of use allowed on a given radio frequency band. The different allowed uses will be grouped into different priority classes and the general rule is that (1) lower priority uses are not allowed to interfere with higher priority uses, and (2) if a higher priority use interferes with a lower priority use it is up to the later to deal with it (move to another frequency, use better shielding to keep the interference out, etc).

Many garage door remotes and keyless entry systems use frequency bands that overlap with bands used for Navy radar and communications and as you can probably guess the Navy's uses are the higher priority.

So a carrier comes in to the shipyard for maintenance or upgrades, and as part of that they test the radar and communication systems and so for however long that takes you've got ridiculously powerful transmitters blasting out on the frequencies your stuff wants to use.

[hedora]

Early car door openers were triggered by normal airplanes, so they’d just randomly open while the homeowners were away.

Lawsuits were filed, and a standard that didn’t have that problem took over.

(Calling the replacement standard “secure” would be overselling it, but I guess it was good enough to make the courts happy.)