Monday, April 12, 2004

Saturday, February 21, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
late Friday afternoon, some locksmiths, car dealerships and towing companies had been flooded with calls about mysteriously malfunctioning keyless vehicle entry devices.
ABC Locksmiths received 30 calls from drivers stumped by the failure of the key systems. Quality Towing received about 25 calls, and two Ford dealerships reported receiving scores of calls about the problem.

But ABC dispatcher Milo Ferguson didn't need to field any calls to know something was amiss.
Jerry Bussell, Gov. Kenny Guinn's adviser on homeland security, ruled out terrorism and described the phenomenon as a "frequency problem."

"This is an anomaly that we're going to check out," Bussell said.

The Country Ford dealership in Henderson, which had handled more than 100 calls by late Friday afternoon, contacted the national Ford headquarters for an explanation.

Katie Baumann, service operator for the dealership, said the Ford company headquarters informed her that "a lot of static electricity in the air could be messing up the radio waves" the devices use.

Local forecasters said they doubted the widespread failures could be attributed to any strange weather patterns.

"We've heard about it, and we don't think so," said Steve Johnson of the National Weather Service in Las Vegas.

Friday's cloudy weather made Bill O'Donnell doubt the theory of static interference. O'Donnell, a research associate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Physics Department and an electrical engineer, said that in "damp weather like we're having today, there won't be much of a static charge in the air. The charge just won't build up in these conditions."

Another possible source of the problem: the sun.

"Solar flares can produce and eject large numbers of charge particles, and usually the Earth's magnetic field deflects them before they enter the atmosphere," said chemistry and physics Professor Malcolm Nicol, the director of the High Pressure Science and Engineering Center at UNLV. "But if they are very large, they have been known to destroy the electronics systems in satellites and cause other problems down here."

However, the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Big Bear, Calif., reported low solar activity Friday.
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posted at 11:54 PM