spy drones coming to your neighborhood!

WASHINGTON - Coming soon to dozens of military bases around the country: radio signals strong enough to jam nearby garage-door openers.

Between now and 2008, the military is supplying a new radio system to roughly 125 bases that uses the same frequency as the one relied upon by more than 90 percent of the remotely operated openers, Pentagon and industry officials say.

The military radio signal is sometimes so strong that it overpowers the opener's signal, preventing the door from opening. Or it can also vastly reduce the opener's range, forcing the user to walk close to the garage before it will open.

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The garage-door opener frequency at issue -- 390 megahertz -- has belonged to the military since around 1950. Openers have legally operated at that frequency since at least the early 1980s, Karasek said.

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Oct 24, 1999

It must be the only occasion in U.S. history when an alligator is known to have stood in the way of efforts to protect the national security. It is also a good Florida yarn. In the mid-1970s, according to newly declassified information, the National Security Agency flew a super-secret, unmanned gliderlike spy plane - Compass Cope-R - over Lake Okeechobee to eavesdrop on Fidel Castro. The craft took off and landed without a pilot on a small runway at Cape Canaveral, and controllers on the ground handled it like a manned plane. It intercepted the Castro government's voice conversations and electronic military radar emissions, transmitting the signals to vans operated by the Air Force and the National Security Agency at Patrick Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral. Until the end, it was a highly successful project, according to National Journal News Service, which uncovered the records of Compass Cope and interviewed Norman Sakamoto, the project chief. Sakamoto said the Compass Cope was unable to land after its 12th and final mission because a wandering alligator was blocking the runway. The aircraft had to circle while a man in the back of a pickup truck lassoed the alligator and dragged it from the runway.

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sptimes/access/45795770.html?dids=45795770:45795770&FMT=FT&FMTS=CITE:FT&date=Oct+24%2C+1999&author=SARA+FRITZ&pub=St.+Petersburg+Times&edition=&startpage=5.A&desc=Gator+on+cape+runway+stalled+spy+plane+flight+Series%3A+WASHINGTON+JOURNAL