Error - 433 MHz is not allowed in country: US - but i'm living in DE

Questions & Help
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to add my garage door opener via 433 MHz in Homey, but I keep getting the following error:

Transmitting 433 MHz is not allowed in country: US

The strange thing is:

  • I live in Germany

  • No VPN active

  • Internet via Starlink

  • According to my IP address, my location is also recognized as Germany

  • My location in the Homey app is correctly set to Germany

Still, Homey seems to think I’m located in the US, where 433 MHz is not allowed.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue or knows how to tell Homey that I’m actually in Germany?

Thanks a lot in advance!

2

Thank you for your post to the Homey Community, but it seems that you may need to report this issue to Athom support.

When you need direct support from Athom please visit Homey Support for our new help center.

If you need help you can read more about how to submit a support request.

3

First of all, welcome to the Homey Community!

To make sure you are aware of the forum rules, please read the Welcome to the forum! post here.

4

Have you tried moving Homey to another country or continent, test it and them move back to where you live?

5

I hadn’t tried that before your suggestion, but I just did: I set the location in Homey to the US, tested it, and then switched it back to Germany. Unfortunately, I’m still getting the exact same error.

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Did that now. :blush:

6

FYI When you wanted to copy the signal: most 433MHz garage/gate remotes can’t be used with Homey, because they use so called rolling code, to prevent it from copying (by unwanted ‘guests’).

1 Like
7

Thanks for pointing that out! I actually have a Tesla in the garage where I had HomeLink installed afterwards. With that setup, the Tesla successfully cloned my remote key — and since then the garage door reliably opens and closes automatically when I approach or leave.

Because this has been working fine for months, I don’t think my garage door uses rolling code. That’s why I’m quite sure my issue is not the remote type, but rather Homey blocking 433 MHz due to the “country: US” restriction.

8

I see! Maybe you’re lucky and can you use it with Homey as well. Although I would not use a non-rolling code system :grimacing:

Yeah I know the country thing needs to be solved first :wink:
Dunno how far you were with setting Homey up, but a factory reset might help in this case.

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9

It looks during Homey activation, the IP address of the request is used to look up the country of origin. Since IP databases change all the time (and are notoriously unreliable anyway) it doesn’t surprise me that Starlink IP addresses aren’t being identified properly.

Why it’s not possible to override this by setting the proper location manually, I don’t know, only Athom will be able to say.

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10

Can you open Homey Developer Tools , log in and check for any US reference? And not sure if Homeys sold in the US have 433 MHz blocked altogether. Might your Homey possibly be a non EU one?

11

No, it’s handled in software: the RF manager checks if the country is blacklisted (US, CA, KR) and if so, emits the error message. And the country seems to only be determined at activation time (so first time you power on Homey and set it up).

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12

Here is a screenshot:

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13

Looks like something is going wrong here, 433 MHz should be available to you.

Please get in touch via support so the team can have a look.

1 Like