Howard Reith repeatedly clicks on his garage door opener. Up close. Farther away. Moves it back and forth, but the door refuses to budge.
And he's not alone. In his Harford County neighborhood, electric garage doors suddenly don't work the way they used to.
Blame the new radio system at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
If this is a showdown of military technology versus consumer gadgetry, it is, not surprisingly, no contest. APG's new radio signals are overpowering the meager, fraction-of-a-watt ones emitted by garage door openers.
Reith lives within sight of the Churchville Testing Site, part of Aberdeen Proving Ground. The installation recently began using the new Land Mobile Radio, which enables the military and first responders to communicate with each other, but it operates on a frequency shared by some garage door openers.
Two weeks ago, about 30 garage door openers in Reith's subdivision became virtually useless. And more Harford County electric garage doors could become unresponsive, as the installation in Aberdeen starts using the radio system.
APG spokesman George Mercer said that the radio system at Aberdeen will be activated sometime next week.
"Some people are very angry at the Army," Mercer said. "Of course, we don't like that. But we need the frequency. It was the frequency assigned to us."
Residents near APG's sites in Churchville and Edgewood have been calling the installation about their malfunctioning garage doors since the radio system was installed. APG has received about a dozen complaints about the garage door openers.
"The military never gave any warning," Reith said. "They just went and changed over."
Mercer said he "didn't get the word out as quickly as I should have" about the new radio system. "It probably wouldn't have helped a whole lot, but at least it could have given a warning."
Residents changed batteries, reprogrammed the controls, replaced the circuit board or hired a repairman for their garage doors.
"How many people replaced their motors when they didn't have to?" asked Jim Hamilton, another Churchville resident.
Laveda Durbin and her husband, also of Churchville, suspected the batteries had died when their garage door stopped working.
"We went over to Sears and the salesman said, 'This is ironic - we had three other people with the same problem,'" Durbin said. "We realized it wasn't just our issue. This was unusual."
Reith hired a mechanic to change the frequency on the receivers for the doors on his three-car garage to avoid the Land Mobile Radio's frequencies. Only one receiver has been changed so far.
"I haven't seen the bill yet, but I say it's going to run me about $300 with about five hours of labor," said Reith, a retired state trooper.
Receivers can cost $50 to $125, depending on the model, said Charles Merryweather, co-owner of Eastern Overhead Door, a garage-repair service in Edgewood, where calls for repairs have come from Aberdeen, Churchville and parts of Bel Air.
Since the Department of Defense began rolling out the Land Mobile Radio in 2004, automatic garage door users near military bases have been complaining. By 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported that one manufacturer had received 7,000 to 10,000 complaints about garage door malfunctions.
Last year, a signal from the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia rendered many garage openers useless. In December 2006, signals from an Air Force facility in Colorado Springs, Colo., affected hundreds of garage doors during a winter storm, according to news reports.
In 2005, residents north of Fort Detrick in Frederick County reported interference after the base activated its 150-foot transmission tower. Most of the calls subsided, though the base received one call last summer, a Fort Detrick spokeswoman said.
"Interference is a fundamental problem in wireless communications," said Tom Hou, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. "It's just like with human beings. If you have more than one person talking, that's considered an interference."
For years, garage door openers operated on frequencies that were seldom used but had been reserved for government communications since World War II, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Defense began using those frequencies for Land Mobile Radio so military and emergency responders could communicate with each other.
"It's a complicated issue. It's one that we end up saying, 'I'm sorry, but there's not much we can do about it,'" Mercer said.
Mark Karasek, executive vice president of engineering and chief technology officer at the Chamberlain Group Inc., a garage door company, recommended that customers wait before making expensive repairs.
"Initially, there's lots of interference when they turn it on and they're calibrating," he said of the military radio systems. "Once they get their calibrations done, then they go to normal operating conditions. The signal is periodic, not continuous. That's why people have interference for a couple of weeks, then it goes away."
But those who can afford it replace the garage door opener with one that operates at 315 megahertz, which could cost $120 to $150, or install a replacement receiver to change the frequency at about $75 apiece, Karasek said.
The military should have warned the public about possible garage malfunctions in the same way that the FCC is handling the coming transition to digital televisions with information and coupons for converters, said Hamilton, who plans to replace his three garage openers.
"This is like an extra tax for us, just because we live near a military base," he said.
Others avoided the repairs by finding homemade solutions.
Tim Schott of Churchville connected a speaker wire from the receptor and stuck it outside his garage. Schott has to drive close enough that his bumper almost hits the garage door and has to aim the opener at the wire.
"I don't feel like spending $200 to fix it at the moment," he said. "If this continues to work, I'll probably live with it this way."
madison.park@baltsun.com