Why Car Keys Mysteriously Stopped Working in North Olmsted, Ohio
Via Science Alert – a perplexing riddle affecting dozens of residents of North Olmsted, Ohio has finally been solved, but not before weeksof wreaking havoc on people who – bizarre as it sounds – were unable to open their car and garage doors.
Despite those early suspicions, an intensive door-to-door investigation led by local authorities determined it was indeed just one rogue device behind the town’s radio transmitters going dark.
The culprit, it turns out, was a home-made device invented by a local electronics enthusiast. He’d designed a specialised gadget to inform him if anybody was upstairs in his house while he was working downstairs in the basement.
“He has a fascination with electronics,” Glassburn said in a statement describing the anonymous local inventor – an individual with special needs who had no idea of the harm he was causing in the wider community, simply due to the radio frequency his gadget continuously operated on.
“The way he designed it, it was persistently putting out a 315 megahertz signal. There was no malicious intent of the device.” That constant broadcast effectively jammed the radio signal for radio devices installed in car doors and garage doors, which frequently operate in the 315MHz to 433MHz radio band.
For the people of North Olmsted at least, life for now can finally return to normal.
The home-invented gadget has now been identified and disabled, Glassburn said, adding there will be no further interference generated by it.
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