Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/22/old-television-repeatedly-knocked-out-entire-villages-broadband-for-18-months.html
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That’s all you need to wipe out broadband in a village? They talk about changing cables, so was it actually interfering with cable broadband or is this just wireless “broadband”?
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In the 70s there were some black and white TV sets that while receiving a channel, transmitted back some signal normally at the local oscillator frequency that disrupted other tv signals. Another culprit were some indoor amplified antennas that had the low-quality amplifier starting to selfoscillate.
They made the TV reception impossible for other tv sets of weaker signals.
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broadband engineers combed the village with a spectrum analyzer
AKA a Cat Detector Van.
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So a agent provocateur could knock out services during - say -elections in large areas with just a few people to hook up equipment?
Great.
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That’s just what they want you to believe.
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AKA a Cat Detector Van.
A loonie detector van, you mean
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It’s people like you what cause unrest.
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Yep. Tin foil hats all round, please.
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What cat detector van?
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The one from the Ministry of Housinge.
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Housinge?
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It was spelled like that on the van.
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And yet, I cannot recall what I had for dinner last night.
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In all fairness, dinner was probably routine, while this is an absolutely enduring classic.
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Beats 17 years. The issue reminded me very much of this story:
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It’s a fair cop.
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Impressive.
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As a ham radio operator, I believe this. So much electronic equipment has little to no filtering, and some stuff really can obliterate large chunks of spectrum (looking at you, switch-mode power supplies). I haven’t been very active on the radio lately partly due to the high noise floor in my neighbourhood which makes it very hard to hear all but the strongest signals.
I’ve tried tracking down noise sources, but even if I do find a source, if the owner of said source is not cooperative there’s not much I can do other than report them to the regulator, which pretty much does nothing unless the interference affects a commercial broadcast or public safety service.
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This sounds like the old TV set had a problem of arcing in its high voltage section (that provides ~25,000V to make the display bright by accelerating the electrons towards the phosphor screen). An arcing high voltage is essentially a spark gap transmitter, so it can wipe out all other weak radio signals in the vicinity ‘from DC to daylight’ as the RF engineers say.
The surprising thing is that it was powerful enough to kill all the broadband in a village, yet didn’t burn up the house.
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