Who hasn't had to deal with interference of some kind at one point or another in their life? Sometimes, it's a trivial thing like your cordless phone causing intermittent problems with your wireless network. Or when I'm taking a trip in to town and someone else's iPod cuts in over my car's speakers as I pass a fellow iPod FM transmitter user who has discovered that 89.5 is the only frequency in town suitable for our use.
Those kinds of interference are usually pretty easy to identify and remove. If your cordless phone is causing problems with your wireless network, try changing your network to use another channel. If you can afford it, upgrade your cordless phone to a 5.8 GHz model to get it out of the 2.4 GHz range in use by most wireless networks. If you can't stand your fellow motorist's choice in music as he overwhelms your FM transmitter, speed up, slow down, or change the station. Simple, right?
Recently, I've been dealing with a different kind of interference. While driving my wife's minivan home one morning, I had some troubles opening my garage door. No matter how much I clicked the button, the door wasn't going up. I chalked it up to a dying battery. The problems disappeared and I didn't give it another thought until the same thing happened to the garage door opener in my car. One failing battery seemed normal, but two different batteries in the span of a week is more than a coincidence.
This morning, my wife was having problems putting the garage door down again and I went outside to hit the wired control inside the garage for her. That's when it hit me. There were construction workers outside working on the new home being built across the street from us. They've been there each time I was having problems opening the garage door. I hadn't had any problems all week because they couldn't work in the rain.
As surprising as it sounds, something they're using over there must be generating enough interference to cause problems with my garage door opener. I have a hard time believing it's a simple power tool or even the large generators they have running. But once again, it seems to be too much of a coincidence for it to not be originating from their work.
Bear with me now before you go calling the metaphor police on me...
Have you ever had to deal with something like this? Interference of some sort in your life that you can't quite pinpoint? You're cruising along with no cares until it blindsides you from out of nowhere and disrupts a lot of things you may have been taking for granted. You're pretty sure you know the point of origin, but it just doesn't make logical sense. You really only have four choices:
- Find some way to eliminate the interference.
- Deal with it and hope it goes away on its own.
- Avoid it as best as you can.
- Pretend it's not there.
Choosing the best course of action is, of course, the tricky part.