Dealing with a faulty, broken and lost garage or gate remote control

Have you got a faulty or broken gate or garage remote control and need to replace it?

First choice would be to replace your remote control with the exact same brand and model as you had before. The same would go for a lost gate remote control as well.

If the remote control is no longer being manufactured you can then use a similar remote control on the market that has the same features as your broken one.

Here are the 3 most common types of remotes:

DIP switch – A DIP switchis a manual electric switch which is designed to be used on a printed circuit board along with other electronics. It can then be customised to a particular electronic device.
Learning remote: A learning remote can receive and store codes transmitted by another remote control via radio frequency; it can then transmit those codes to receiver that can read them.
Self learning remote (code hopping) – Each time your remote performs its self-learning, a new code is generated
The caveat is the safety feature of each type of remote control which must be taken into consideration. Older generation garage and gate remote controls are the DIP switch type. They have pins that can be manually moved to set a frequency. By setting the DIP switches inside the transmitter, you control the code that the transmitter sends. The garage door would only open if the receiver’s DIP switches are set to the same pattern. This provides some level of security, but not much. Eight DIP switches provide only 256 possible combinations

Many garage door opener remote controls use fixed-code encoding which use DIP switches or soldering to do the address pins coding process, For these fixed-code garage door opener remotes, one can easily clone the existing remote using a self-learning remote control duplicator (copy remote) which can make a copy of the remote using face-to-face copying.

Secondly unfortunately these frequencies are easily copied if someone gets hold of your remote control. All they have to do is open the remote with a small screw driver and take a photo of the pin pattern and then duplicate it into a new DIP switch remote control.

New generation remote controls use something called a hopping code or a rolling code to provide security.

This is the safest type of remote control for your gate or garage door as the frequency can only be set from the receiver that is attached to your gate motor. Your gate motors should always be locked and protected by an antitheft bracket.