Still deadlining. Oy. But I’m beginning to believe that the light I see at the end of that tunnel might not be an onrushing train. This weekend I’m going to collapse in a happy heap. Meanwhile, the news …
- “Penn Jillette’s 10 commandments for atheists.” I’m neither an atheist nor a fan of commandments. Still, these are pretty good. (Tip o’ hat to PT.)
- Can any of you techno-hackers tell me if this might work at a distance of 50 yards or so? I’ve had this little problem …
- Six things nobody will tell you about MF Global. I mean, aside from don’t try to bail yourself out with your clients’ money after making billion dollar bets that anybody could have told you were a really dumb idea.
- “How debt put my dreams on hold.”
- What governments want Google to remove. (Tip o’ hat to JS.)
- Here’s your awwwwwwww story of the week And as a bonus, it’s a hair-raising adventure, besides.
- “Get well soon, Scott!” ScottOlsen.org
The CB trick should work. That is, it passes the BS sniff test, but I don’t have a “footwarmer” and I’ve never deliberately tried to overload the front end of someone’s stereo. I have seen this happen before inadvertently with a cheap PA system and the local clear-channel AM radio outlet.
Some CBers cut out the “limiter” in the CB for more power at the expense of interference and splatter on adjacent bandwidth. I’m guessing that would help.
To anyone who tried to reproduce: Please remember to use your new found powers for good, not evil. The closest analog I can come up with is that guy down my street with the motorcycle. Apparently, setting off the other neighbor’s car alarm with his tailpipe emissions is one joke that just never gets old. Please don’t be that guy.
A cb radio will indeed overload and play through unattached speakers, range will depend on the amount of power, radio alone is about 4 watts, linear amps and better antennas will increase range, you can make a directional antenna out of wire very cheap and easy, the yagi;
http://radio.meteor.free.fr/us/antenna.html
cb is 11 meters.
http://www.signalengineering.com/ultimate/yagi.html
Simple 3 element should do the trick, likely that radio alone would work without the amp.
In the summer of 1976, or thereabouts, I stayed in MacGregor House dormitory, while they did maintenance on Baker House. My room looked out on a courtyard. I wired my stereo together with a friend’s, and we blasted Led Zeppelin into the courtyard from two windows. One day, between records, we heard a muffled voice come from our speakers. “Turn your stereo down, turn your stereo down,” it said. I don’t know how far away the transmitter was, but it was a good hack. Didn’t work, though. We continued to blast Led Zeppelin into the courtyard.
Boxie the puppy looks like the reincarnation of my dearly departed Pearl, a greyhound pitbull mix. It brought a tear to my eye. Pearl was the best friend I ever had.
The CB trick *should* work…..the reason I say *should* is because generally a properly made radio will create minimal interference….however, if you put a ‘linear’ amplifier on it….which, according to the FCC is illegal…..(CB’s are limited to 5 watts), it might do the trick…most CB linears are pretty crappy in quality, and spray large amounts of spurious (unwanted) radio at frequencies that they shouldn’t. Those spurious signals will probably pretty effectively crawl into your neighbors equipment. The speaker wires make pretty good antennas.
A directional antenna for that frequency (at your end) would be too large…..5 feet long by 4 wide probably ……it would be pretty obvious. A regular old mag mount whip should do the trick fine….
A regular CB might work unamplified at a mere 50 yards….might be worth a try…they can be had at flea markets fairly cheap.
What a great dog story…thanks, I needed that.
Thank you, monkeywrenching technoids. 🙂
I’m hoping my neighborhood noise problem has finally been solved by a talk I had with the offender’s landlady and a talk she had with him. The neighbor in question was running a karaoke operation two nights a week in an open garage across the street from my house with a speaker about the size of a Chevy Volt. Other neighbors had called police several times during the summer (something I wouldn’t do), and I had gone over twice to ask them to quiet down — all of which had nearly no effect. They may have shut down now only because it’s getting cold, though I’m hoping the landlady really put the stop to it. If they start up again … I’m gonna have to get me a CB and hope it works on their gigantomongous “six-in-one” speaker.
And the dog story … yeah, I’ve read that three times and am still going Awwwwwwww. Everybody involved (except the pup’s original humans, whoever they might have been) seems to have behaved so humanely and sensibly. I was particularly moved that the train operators took so many precautions to save Boxie.
I was reading that story “How debt put my dreams on hold,” I have agree with various commenters a that site that post college decisions, excaberated that problem and the college loan debt wasn’t the only issue. It was heartwarming though to learn the nice lady from Paraguay found a nice american lad to finance her dreams.
Anyway. It is a disgrace that what is considered “higher” education in our country is really just an instrument for finance companies to generate more prduct in the form of student loans. It seems the reason to seek higher education is now to enrich the schools and their financiers, not learn something new or ultimately contribute to society.
Yes-the CB trick will work. Back around 1976,when CB was the thing,a neighbor had a two kilowatt linear that could hear by plugging in my casstte player and pushing “play” without a tape in it-the power lines were the antenna, the diodes in the power supply the detector. it also distorted the TV picture when he fired it up(the guy was cool about it,and after a few complaints,would only fire it up after midnight-skip was better then,anyway..)
The downside is you need to crank out some wattage to do this,and you’d need an antenna suited to the linear you are using(tho’ normal wattage CBs can cause interference in some things-lots of variables here-at a side job I had right out of high school, I had to help chase down CB interference in a night club’s sound system-it was near a road,and you could plainly hear CB interference. Sometimes,a poor solder/cruddy connection(especially where two different metals meet) joint acts as a diode,and you’ll get interference in strange places. I had a “haunted” rechargeable flashlight that did! A creepy old house,with voices coming out of the kitchen! When I heard “The Sound Of Philadelphia”, I figured it wasn’t ghosts(I was 14 at the time), I investigated and found music coming from the rechargeable flashlight…it was, in effect, a untuned crystal radio-many signals coming in at once, with the strongest predominating. Everything was there-an antenna(power line), detector(diode in power supply),and speaker(probably a loose capacitor, or maybe the battery). Do a search under “crystal radio” or “foxhole radio” to see just how simple a radio can be.
I’ve had good luck with noisy neighbors by just talking to them,and asking them to ease off a bit..every now and the, you meet a real prick,but most people are decent about it.
A trick that might work just as well…….
A neon sign transformer makes rather a LOT of voltage…..somewhere north of 20,000 volts. They can be had for reasonable prices…..if one were to take one of those, and rig up a ‘jacobs ladder’…..using coat hangers arranged in a vertical pair with the bottom of the pair of wires being about 1/2 inch apart, and the top being about 3 inches apart…….you will, upon power, up get a rather impressive spark that will start out small at the 1/2 inch gap, and grow loud, large and fat at the top…..it will climb up….great for mad scientists…..and very very noisy in the EM spectrum……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_voltage_traveling_arc#Visual_entertainment
It should create a nice loud braaaaaaakkkkk sound in karaoke equipment…..
Let us know if the annoyance returns……I can perhaps assist…..I do have such a device…….we HAVE the technology……
…or you could just go join the karaoke party. 😉
LOL, Kent. Yeah … that’ll happen. Just my very favorite thing to do: Stand on the concrete floor of a garage for four hours, slugging down beer and singing. Badly. In Spanish. To the sounds of tubas and accordions.
Um … I think I’ll stick with the CB thing. Or maybe even UnReconstructed’s mad-scientist antenna.
Hi Claire
In reference to your first sentence, I was once told that, “due to budgetary reasons, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.” 😉 So it could still be that train… .Just a little humor 🙂
Gotta quibble with Penn’s Six. All human life? I’m a Heinleinian. If you don’t know what that means, go read Lazarus Long’s Notebook.
EE here, but admittedly don’t work on RF.
I’m gonna call baloney on this CB thing. OK, it MIGHT work, but you’d pretty much have to either have physical access to the receiving equipment to examine it and experiment with it, or else have a LOT of other things going for you: You’re gonna have to know where the receiving equipment is so you can aim your antenna correctly, will have to have a linear amp to get the power required, the receiver’s circuit is going to have to be REALLY poorly designed, the receiver’s case is going to have to be made out of plastic, and not include any RF shielding inside, you’ll have to have a directional antenna.
Has it ever happened before? Sure. Could you reproduce it again on arbitrary equipment? I doubt it.
Nathan,
This is a karaoke setup…..great big speakers (good antenna), microphone with cable……Almost certainly not a professional setup, probably a cheap KMart sort of thing. No bypass caps…..no inline chokes.
Shielding is probably nonexistent.
You use a ‘linear’ to get the tons of harmonics and spurs that come with a badly executed amplifier….since CB amps are illegal, they are usually very cheaply built, and spray RF all around the spectrum.
A CB by itself MIGHT do it….since it works at ~27Mhz, a 1/4 wave resonant antenna will be around 2-3 meters……guessing that the speaker wires would be at least this long.
Modern consumer equipment is astonishingly susceptible to RF interference.
Instead of wondering how to monkeywrench the kareoke with a CB, maybe direct action? Have car insurance? Home owners insurance? Just accidentally drive through the garage and kareoke machine, problem solved.
Um … and the five or six guys standing around the karaoke machine drinking beer?
I’m hoping the “direct action” of talking to Karaoke Guy’s landlady did the trick. If not, an RF monkeywrench seems an elegant solution. I picture their faces when their mariachi is suddenly interrupted by … oh, John Cage? The Insane Clown Posse? No, I’ve got it … Pat Boone. Surely some garage will have some old Pat Boone albums somewhere. Or Anita Bryant. Yeah. Or … Lawrence Welk! I can just see the look on those guys’ faces …
Unfortunately, the look on my face at being forced to listen to Lawrence Welk would be pretty dire, too. Or any of the above, for that matter.
Um … and the five or six guys standing around the karaoke machine drinking beer?
Collateral damage…. LOL
p.s. I’m a ham radio operator and agree that a CB running a bootleg high powered amp would probably do the trick but it would also probably affect everyone else in the neighborhood. Not a good neighbor building policy.