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Originally Posted by ilene
I just mention that because I noticed your daily to commute to the DFW area and don't know if there is a connection for our cars as I also had the check engine light come on after a Mavericks game mid May.
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Seeing this comment reminded me of a strange story at work. I work on a tactical radar system here in the Phoenix area. Our radar is pretty close to a fairly major road.
One day, about two years ago, a gentleman called and identified himself as someone from FoMoCo headquarters in Michigan. He wanted to know if we could disclose the frequency range our radar operates in. I told him I couldn't do that, as we weren't an FAA unit, but strictly combat, so it was classified. He then told me why he needed to know.
Apparently, various Ford products (I think they were mostly Land Rovers and Expeditions) had been reporting problems with their airbag warning lights around the metro Phoenix area. These vehicles were brought into the dealerships for troubleshooting, but the techs could never find the problem. After quite a few of these large SUVs had been bought back by Ford, their corporate headquarters decided assign a team to look into this problem.
The team found out that most of these problems were happening on a single stretch of road. After visiting this road, they saw our radar and did some tests. They concluded that our radar was setting off the airbag lights. Their fix was to change the frequency that their sensors operated on, and wanted to know our frequency range so that they could design a system around it. So, I put them in touch with our security personnel.
Another problem I've seen with vehicle electronics and our radar: I teach motorcycle safety. Our motorcycle range is within eyesight of the radar bunker. On two separate occasions, Yamaha R1 motorcycles kept stalling on our range. On the first day, we just had the R1 keep his RPMs up, since it seemed like it was stalling from low RPMs. On the second time that another R1 was out there, we noticed a pattern with this make of motorcycle. Watching the radar spin around, the bike kept shutting off when the antenna was pointed at it!
Apparently, many makes of vehicles have various components that rely on certain frequency ranges to operate.