By Keith Rogers Las Vegas Review-Journal
The persistence of a Las Vegas man helped a team of engineers solve the mystery of malfunctioning keyless car-door devices that has badgered many local residents since a massive outage in February. Bill Zawistowski, 56, said Wednesday that he was visited at his home by a pair of engineers from Ford Motor Co.'s Dearborn, Mich., office and one from Alps Automotive, which makes keyless car-door devices, also known as key fobs.
He said they used his driveway and his keyless vehicle entry device to help pinpoint where an electronic signal was coming from that jammed the frequency of thousands of key fobs.
"I'm the guy that caused the ruckus," Zawistowski, an electrical engineer, said about the complaints he first raised with the Federal Communications Commission and later the companies involved.
He said he was more persistent than other customers because his wife suffers from a muscle disease and depends on electronic openers to enter their vehicle and the garage.
"Eventually, Ford said they'd come to town," he said.
When engineers Nabil Hachem and Earl Morse arrived Aug. 2 at his house near the foot of Sunrise Mountain, on the east side of the Las Vegas Valley, they tried to no avail to open his vehicle door with a keyless device.
It was similar to what hundreds of motorists experienced across the Las Vegas Valley on Feb. 20 when they were forced to open their vehicle doors the old-fashioned way, with a key.
"When they were six inches away and couldn't get the door open they weren't happy," Zawistowski recalled about the engineers. "But at least they had something that would always fail."
Using Zawistowski's driveway as a starting point, the engineers and Alps' John Cabigao set out to find the offending signal with a signal direction finder mounted on top of a Ford Freestar.
According to a statement from Ford officials, "Tall buildings and other structures that cause signals to bounce around forced team members to drive around for two days to collect multiple readings.
"This exhaustive search led to general placement of the offending signal -- a transmission from the top of nearby Frenchman Mountain," the statement read.
Their search, assisted by a local radio maintenance company, steered them to a faulty radio signal repeater on the mountain that since the winter had been stuck in the transmit mode.This caused it to send out a strong signal that interfered with the frequency used by thousands of keyless entry devices and remote garage door openers.
Maurice Durand, a spokesman for Ford's western region, said the signal repeater is used to boost radio communications during aerial search and rescue operations.
The repeater switch has since been fixed, he said.