Bill Richard

Folks, I have had a similar problem with my 2010 RX350. I could not open the garge door sometimes when my bumper was almost touching the garage door. Several times, I had to get out and open the door with the keypad. I went to the dealer and complained and they said it works on our tester, we cannot do anything for you. I complained to the Service Manager and they graciously offered to replace it, which they did. It now works better, I have not had to exit the car to use the keypad, but it is still very inferior to the remote control that comes with the garage door opener. I still have to be very close to the door to use the Lexus opener and it often takes several tries as I sit there. My wife uses the remote opener that came with the same Sears garage door opener and she can open the garage from about 100 yards away...so much for the interference theory. Here is an interesting tidbit...I can open my second garage door easily from over 100 feet away. It is a different and older Sears opener than the one I have trouble with. Why does this one work so well? This is the reason, I believe. I replaced my troublesome garage door opener 2 or 3 years ago, when it failed. All of a sudden, the remote I had would not work for both garage door openers. I called Sears and discussed this with the service department. I was told that the US Government made them change frequencies for garage door openers because they usurped the current frequency for other reasons so the new garage door openers actually use a different frequency than the old ones. That explained why both doors worked well with their respective remotes, but would no longer work for each other's remotes...a feature I like because it meant you only had to have one remote in each car. When I received my Lexus from the dealer, I was amazed that the remote would work for both doors..just think, it could hold different security codes in memory and could tune to different frequencies. As an engineer, I know this was quite a feat from a cheap mass produced little pc board. The amazement was over as time went on and I found out how intermittent was the ability of the opener to operate the door with the new opener on the new frequency. Here is what I believe is the cause of the problem. I believe that the Lexus remote is transmitting on the old frequency, indeed it works very well on my older garage door opener. The only reason why it works at all on the new door is because these little transmitters are very cheap and they transmit on the primary frequency plus harmonics of the primary frequency (think a blast of energy kind of on the right frequency plus some spurious transmissions). The harmonic signal must overlap the new frequency enough to energize the receiver on the opener and allow the signal to be decoded. This explains why the opener is so intermittent because the transmissions of harmonics are much weaker in power with each harmonic signal farther away from the primary. In other words, the only reason why it works at all is by luck! I have not told Lexus, because, who do I tell? The Service people would not get this or be able to do anything with it. I hope some smart Lexus engineer, who cares, reads this and measures this with a spectrum analyzer. It is an easy problem to understand, hard to fix. So I say this to all of you. The problem is real, it is not your imagination, it is not interfence. Lexus does not have a fix and is not addressing it that I know of.