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- Jun 21, 2012
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Here is a side note that may or may not interest you. I bought my first house in Dayton, Ohio, about thirty-something years ago. It came with a detached two-car garage and an automatic garage door opener. The door opener was based on a tone-encoded Citizens Band transmitter and, IIRC, a vacuum tube receiver. The remote control transmitters were missing. So a quick trip to Sears secured a new chain-driven door opener mechanism with solid-state electronics. A significant upgrade, but still pretty much obsolete, or verging on obsolete, because remote controls (mainly for automotive key-less entry systems) were beginning to use so-called "rolling codes" to prevent unauthorized reception and copying of the "code" the end-user (me) selected to transmit and operate the remote control mechanism. A patient thief could park outside my garage and try every possible code combination, selected by a few three-position slide switches on my Sear remote, until they found the one that worked. Not very secure, but I had almost nothing of value stored in the garage anyway.
Rather than spend money on a better-encoded transmitter/receiver pair, I simply decided to turn the whole system off every night when I got home. That meant the garage was vulnerable during the day to anyone with the "right" code to activate the receiver. I don't recall that ever being a real problem however. Now that we have moved to Florida, the Genie garage door system seems fairly sophisticated. There is a "training" mode that allows each remote to be synchronized with the mothership. So far, so good. Plus this is a "stand your ground" state, which tends to take the sand out of most trespassers.
Rather than spend money on a better-encoded transmitter/receiver pair, I simply decided to turn the whole system off every night when I got home. That meant the garage was vulnerable during the day to anyone with the "right" code to activate the receiver. I don't recall that ever being a real problem however. Now that we have moved to Florida, the Genie garage door system seems fairly sophisticated. There is a "training" mode that allows each remote to be synchronized with the mothership. So far, so good. Plus this is a "stand your ground" state, which tends to take the sand out of most trespassers.