It seems [Kevin] has particularly bad luck with neighbors. His first apartment had upstairs neighbors who were apparently a dance troupe specializing in tap. His second apartment was a town house, which had a TV mounted on the opposite wall blaring American Idol with someone singing along very loudly. The people next to [Kevin]’s third apartment liked music, usually with a lot of bass, and frequently at seven in the morning. This happened every day until [Kevin] found a solution (Patreon, but only people who have adblock disabled may complain).
In a hangover-induced rage that began with thumping bass at 7AM on a Sunday, [Kevin] tore through his box of electronic scrap for every capacitor and inductor in his collection. An EMP was the only way to find any amount of peace in his life, and the electronics in his own apartment would be sacrificed for the greater good. In his fury, [Kevin] saw a Yaesu handheld radio sitting on his desk. Maybe, just maybe, if he pressed the transmit button on the right frequency, the speakers would click. The results turned out even better than expected.
With a car mount antenna pointed directly at the neighbor’s stereo, [Kevin] could transmit on a specific, obscure frequency and silence the speakers. How? At seven in the morning on a Sunday, you don’t ask questions. That’s a matter for when you tell everyone on the Internet.
Needless to say, using a radio to kill your neighbor’s electronics is illegal, and it might be a good idea for [Kevin] to take any references to this escapade off of the Internet. It would be an even better idea to not put his call sign online in the future.
That said, this is a wonderful tale of revenge. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, either. Wikihow, Yahoo Answers and Quora – the web pages ‘normies’ use for the questions troubling their soul – are sometimes unbelievably literate when it comes to unintentional electromagnetic interference, and some of the answers correctly point out grounding a stereo and putting a few ferrite beads on the speaker cables is the way to go. Getting this answer relies entirely on asking the right question, something I suspect 90% of the population is completely incapable of doing.
While [Kevin]’s tale is a grin-inducing two-minute read, You shouldn’t, under any circumstances, do anything like this. Polluting the airwaves is much worse than polluting your neighbor’s eardrums; one of them violates municipal noise codes and another is breaking federal law. It’s a good story, but don’t do it yourself.
Editor’s Note: Soon after publishing our article [Kevin] took down his post and sent us an email. He realized that what he had done wasn’t a good idea. People make mistakes and sometimes do things without thinking. But talking about why this was a bad idea is one way to help educate more people about responsible behavior. Knowing you shouldn’t do something even though you know how is one paving stone on the path to wisdom.
–Mike Szczys
I’m a little confused about his antenna placement. Isn’t it about 90° off, if he’s trying to broadcast through that wall with an omni?
That was my thought.
https://media.giphy.com/media/EouEzI5bBR8uk/giphy.gif
I don’t find it unlikely that this would work. I couldnt use my cb radio sometimes because it had the same effect on the family 50 feet away.
well did not quite catch what does the specific frequency to that stereo and how?
This is absolutely 100% against federal law and if anyone happened to report Kevin Darrah (KA2ZNI) in WI he would probably get a little education from the friendly folks at the FCC. And the fact that he’d had his “ticket” for just over a month when this “revenge” was posted is made obvious by the pic on his Patreon page. RF doesn’t radiate up from the top of the antenna, genius, it radiates out. You are putting more RF energy into that guitar than you are your neighbors wall.
If he is a licensed ham, and is transmitting on a frequency that his license permits, and the interference is unintended, then it is legal.
Consumer electronics are supposed to be designed to reject external interference. Often they do not due to manufactures cutting cost…
It was intended, therefor illegal.
Also unless they changed the wording even unintentional interference is illegal once notified about it… Your neighbor complains to the FCC that youl ham’ing is knocking out their tv yeah you can get fined.
Nope. Not if you are transmitting purely within band and not merely for the purposes of interfering. If the neighbor’s TV, stereo, or whatever reacts to RF frequencies it’s not designed to pick up, that’s their problem for buying crappy products. As a licensed radio operator you are under no obligation to resolve problems with unintentional receivers even if it is good practice for those who’d like to keep the peace and help others.
Pete Sanders is absolutely correct. Read CFR47 Part 97 and this is not “interference” but rather a malfunction on the part of the consumer electronics. Please everybody read: http://www.arrl.org/regulatory-rfi-information. The ARRL knows more about this subject than most other organizations.
nope
if his neighbors are disturbing his peace i call it creative problem solving
Doubt the FCC would do anything to him. Worst thing he would likely get is a warning letter. These days, an armature radio op really really has to cause quite a ruckus before the FCC will take notice. Even if the FCC issues a forfeiture order, they are powerless to collect it without help from the Department of Justice.
Fortunately, most most hams do behave themselves.
You sound like someone who hasn’t been v& before. If you’re razing hell in the wrong place, they just show up, and everything with an antenna disappears. If you’re a ham, you’re not getting away with just-a-warning either.
On the other hand, if you’re far removed from anything interesting, they’re not likely to bother you – unless you piss of another ham.
“If you’re razing hell in the wrong place, they just show up, and everything with an antenna disappears.” The only cases that I’ve read about something like that happening these days is when somebody goes well above and beyond the typical troublemaker and does something like jam police or emergency comms.
Most of the ham ne’er do wells that I’ve read about that the FCC goes after receive a NAL/FO only after having a very long history of causing trouble and being issued numerous warnings. From there, the offending individual may pay it if he can get the FCC to reduce the fine to a relatively small amount compared with the original amount or he can not pay up and when renewal time runs around, submit a renewal application. From there, it can take considerable time before the renewal application gets dismissed if ever from failing to pay the fine.
Yep. a lot of tech hams now-days barely know how anything works because all you have to do is memorize a pool of questions, not actually know anything.
I resemble that remark.
Which is one reason I keep coming here.
As are all levels of ham licence, all licences have set answers you can memorize. So what your point.
Talking of federal law, did you know US federal law officially only applies to US territory? HaD didn’t know.
The kid realized he made a mistake and you have to call him out like that? You sir (or madam), are a special breed of jerk. It’s not like he shot the neighbors dog that wouldn’t stop barking. He learned some material and put it into practical use. Good for him! Now, I just hope he will be smarter in the future with his knowledge.
Nobody likes a tattle-tale. Instead of being a jerk, maybe you could’ve posted that what he was doing was illegal and that it’s in his best interest to stop.
well said
My dog actually got shot. :( my neighbors are cruel and I’m out in the country. Far far away from hardly anything at all. I wouldn’t mind becoming a ham operator. For safety reasons of course. I have 6 kids and these neighbors shoot everything. The country life probably needs a long range cb over 4 watts. Wouldn’t you agree? I have no idea how to get one of those. That’s where I’m lost. I’m too far away from ppl to reach anyone in an emergency? Or just talk to anyone period🤔
Nah. They wouldn’t say a thing. The FCC is too busy regulating the Internet and doing their part to double the national debt. Sleep well Kevin.
I tend to agree… he’s a small fish in a big pond with shallow pockets.
While I appreciate that anyone gives a damn about the hobby, the thing about ham radio being self-policing is that we don’t have to call the feds and pretend we’re the Captain from Cool Hand Luke every time some kid with a wet-ink ticket discovers they can do intensely stupid things. The FCC would rather you do the educating on stuff like this– and I can imagine they’re more inclined toward that now they’ve shuttered the field offices.
Calling him a genius and trying to get him an FCC nastrygram is an example of the problem with ham radio, not the solution. If you want to be RF Cop, where you need to be is 14 MHz. Or heck, anywhere below 30MHz. It’s crap out there, and it’s not newbies with unprogrammed Baofengs causing the problem.
>” If you want to be RF Cop, where you need to be is 14 MHz. Or heck, anywhere below 30MHz. It’s crap out there,”
HF has become the Rust Belt of the RF spectrum.
TIP: Don’t forget to remove that EXIF data!
When I was a young kid experimenting with a Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics kit, I hooked up a little AM transmitter to my FM boombox radio. I discovered that I could hear a nearby neighbor’s cordless phone when I keyed the transmitter. My mom caught me eavesdropping one day and told me it was wrong. I proceeded to tell her all the juicy gossip I’d overheard and she waited until I finished. Then she told me it was wrong again.
i wonder what the nonlinear element in that setup is, that makes the signals from the phone frequency shift up and down into the fm radio range….. asa opposed to addition, there needs to be some sort of multipliccation going on for heterodyning like that….
Most likely heterodyne. The little trasmitter outputs one frequency and lots of harmonics which get mixed to the frequencies used by the cordless phone or its base, resulting in their sum and difference.
If one of the resulting frequencies happen to be the right one to pass beyond the radio front end, it gets demodulated and you hear the communication. The transmitter in this scenario acted as a local oscillator.
I want to lower my neighbor’s nerve-jaggling, ridiculously loud ringer.
This reads like a story that 2600 magazine published when it started allowing “hacker fiction”.(something that has made me questions continuing to buy the magazine ever since) That story was unbelievable and this one is equally as unbelievable. The story is waaay too vague to be believed as is. I mean “obscure frequency”!?!? WTF does that even mean?
I tend to agree, the smell of BS is all over this.
I couldn’t read the article (yeah I disabled ublock) so I’m only speculating what you’re referring to.
It’s totally plausible to interfere with radio and TV sets using transmitters. In some cases you don’t even need a receiver to be present at all in the appliance you’re interfering with: my old Fostex recording mixer would larsen the heck out of the speakers if I operated my CB handheld radio (4 watt tx power) within meters of it.
All audio devices contain what is needed to detect the modulation in a radio signal: junctions. You need only one of them to be exposed to radio frequency in the audio signal path. A long enough trace on the pcb, or a poorly filtered supply wire can act as antenna and inject the signal into the appliance.
This explains why you often see low value capacitors paired in parallel with high value ones in supply lines, like say a 1 nF ceramic paired with a 220nF poly and a 100 uF electrolytic: low value ones present low impedance to high frequencies, high value ones to low frequencies. A 50 Hertz signal can be completely quenched by a 3.300 uF electrolytic while most of a 100MHz signal would jump it like it was a high value resistor.
Thanks for the tip, atomic3. Based on the meta data in the photo the pic is from 2013. The only licensed Kevin Darrah in 2013 was KD8NNB in OH.
Sure, but maybe you want to visit Kevin and he’s moved to a house now. In his previous post he’s showing off his cool setup and in the EXIF we see his new house.
that reminds me.. I need to fix the date on my DSLR before I use it again. it currently thinks it’s the year I bought it.
This story is exactly that, a story. There is no hack, *pointing* a dipole antenna at the stereo? Let’s get real. Admins’ please just delete this story.
Hey just throwing this out there, but the power wires in the walls are going to run in parallel to the wall, so maybe having the antenna at 90* isn’t so dumb if you are trying to make a ground wire pick up noise.
On the other hand…. real names and crime on the internet? Somebody tell 4chan to get the van!
Ok with all FCC complains and other stuff, I want to know how this happend, why the stereos got knock out because a frequency.
The output power must be quite high if you could do that even with a freacking hand held radio.
oh i doubt you will ever find out. there are many stars that need to align for somethig like this to happen with a handheld… (max 10 watt-ish?). soo many variables…
but my personal guess is that most likely the final transistors in the stereo would be most susceptible.
if the output impedance of the final transistors, and the impedance of the speakers happen to be severily mismatched, you can get power reflected back from the speaker into the transistors. now we alread established that there was a lot of power coming out of the speakers, so there could be a significant amount of power going back at the transistors, essentially making them heat up more.
now if it just happens that the wire from the stereo to the speakers was a certain length of multiples of quarter wavelengths of the handhelds transmit freuency… it might have pushed an already stressed transistor beyound what it can handle….
I think it is more likely that the input transistors got overdriven with noise, which caused a square wave on the outputs. That’s the most common way to destroy speakers. It’s easier to overdrive inputs than outputs because last stage in most amplifiers has voltage gain of 1 or smaller.
Amplifiers, especially in cheap radios and TVs get overdriven by cellphone transmission which causes that characteristic chirping/buzzing sound in the speakers.
Passive-aggressive behavior and violating FCC regulations? Classy.
Brian, this does not qualify as a “hack” and sharing this story is a poor editorial choice for HaD. I come here looking for interesting solutions to interesting problems, and for the sometimes silly things that come up. The subject of this story. stooped to their level by fighting fire with fire, and did so illegally. Please reconsider such posts in the future, as it gives this site, and garage hackers everywhere, a bad name.
I dunno if legality (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!) is an issue.
But this story wasn’t big on detail. He pointed his radio at the wall in anger, and, fuck me!, somehow or other something happened. Annoying neighbours can be the bane of your life, and this is quicker and more effective than months of calling the local council with noise complaints.
I doubt he’d have got anywhere with his planned EMP. Maybe if he’d wrapped some fireworks round the coil or something.
Still maybe not a hack, but my neighbor just sizzled my expensive Zenith vcr/vhs recorder dubber with a handheld radio. I went looking for answers and wound up reading this discussion. I want answers too.
That’s what I like aboiut this group. They NEVER left something pass without checking into the Pinocchio count first.
cr*p, and no way to edit text – a useful feature for the future.
If you screw up a hackaday comment – it’s forever! No stealth-editing allowed. :-)
I have brought this up many times.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/bass.png
I wonder how little transmit power you could use to overload a stereo if you focused the rf radiation with an eliptical dish?
Overloading is a different matter, If you are talking about the amp you need serious power and GHZ band if you don’t want a giant dish. Inducing a hum in the audio is easier and don’t require much power and lower frequencies.
Completely legal, and slightly different:, In the 90’ies I lived in an apartment complex with wooden floors and beams and my upstairs neighbour got cable. He also had a VCR on a tv trolley 4″ above the floor. I hooked up a yagi antenna to my set top box and hung it vertically from the ceiling under his vcr and got all his cable channels. The antenna amp in his vcr was badly enough shielded to radiate enough for me to pick it up!
Sadly, let me tell you my 5W Baofeng on either 144 MHz or 446 MHZ will block an FM receiver.–A $$ Bose Wave Radio. Filters on the Bose fixed its (Bose) Malfunction. Yes, the Bose design engineering HAS gotten that bad. They ripped out all the front end filters to save $$ on the consumer devices.
As far as I can tell, Bose has always made overpriced crap.
I know getting up there in years when I say anything that starts with, “Back when I was a young man” but we used to just solve problems with good old intimidation and violence. Damn kids these days are so soft they probably don’t know what a tire iron is or that it has more than three intended uses! Now get off my lawn!
I couldn’t agree more. Just knock on the neighbors door and very calmy whisper to his ear “i will stab you in the motherf$&kin neck with a rusty screwdriver if you dont turn off that music”. It works everytime.
Also, find the opposite and work with it. In college I had some people living on the other side of a rental duplex that decided they would play drums starting at 3AM or so.
After calming down a lot I decided to play the situation, putting on a police trainee shirt that a friend had given me (the State Police training academy was near campus) and knocking on the door, politely, at 7AM and politely asked them not to do it again.
The still-stoned neighbors peered at me with bloodshot eyes, looked at the logo on the shirt and…never did it again.
The internet is broken. If it requires watching ads I’ll pass.
+1. Thanks
There’s always a way.
[The Internet has been broken for years.]
I’ve seen this demonstrated (done) before, but using significantly more power than you get out of a handheld radio and with a much better directional antenna.
e.g. more like 100W on 144Mhz and a high gain yagi antenna through a wooden floor (plasterboard walls would probably be the same)
The result however was not silence but a very loud buzzing / humming noise.
I guess its not impossible to get silence but it seems somewhat unlikely that inducing current inside the stereo system is going to produce nice clean DC.
Perhaps what is happening is not that the audio system was being interfered with but some sort of mute function was being induced, or perhaps some sort of fail-safe mute was being engaged.
HF band transmission used to cause more RFI for Ham operators than VHF, because the power outputs allowed on HF tended to be more than on VHF (I think in the USA the power allowed may be in the kilowatt range (peak power), but don’t quote me),
Yep, 1500 watts output at the transmitter is OK.
1.5kW PEP… even a modest Yagi would give you +8dBd… that’s nearly 10kW ERP on the beam. I built a 5 element quad that gives me nearly +15dBd, and it’s not that big… throw 1500W PEP on it, and before it turns to ash, it would throw out 46kW ERP. That’s a lot of energy.
Then you get rid of your neighbours completely. First they lose their ability to reproduce then their hair before they die in agonizing pain bleeding from every orifice.
I know that’s sort of a joke, but I’ll just mention: the first symptom is often your vision blurring, and by then it’s too late to save your eyesight. http://www.rfsafetysolutions.com/RF%20Radiation%20Pages/RF_Protective_Garments.html
Sadly, it does not take 100W and a Yagi to cause cheap consumer devices to Malfunction. My 5W Baofang will do it with a good whip antenna into a Bose Wave Radio. And the Bose is expensive! I maintain it is not interference – it is consumer device malfunction. The only solution to the Bose was ab set of filters.
I wonder if he properly identified when he transmitted? Also, in the article, he makes it sound like having his license makes it a better idea. It seems to me I’ve heard that the FCC is far more strict on a licensed ham causing intentional interference than an unlicensed person doing it, because the hams are *SUPPOSED* to know better.
BTW, HaD, please remove this article. This sort of stuff doesn’t belong on HaD.
Have to agree overall with you. But the amateur is technically within the law because he is not causing interference– it’s the consumer device that is actually malfunctioning– it overloads in an RF field. and now with poor and cheap RF design on these devices, they will overload with a transmitter putting 5 watts into a whip antenna- range about 20 feet. Been there-done it.
He’s only within the law if he properly identified his transmission and had some legit purpose for it. (bothering the neighbors doesn’t count).
To keep it legal, I’d suggest calling CQ for a few minutes, listening for a reply, and repeating.
Hmmm… except what about if you are transmitting with the obvious and only reason of causing problems for someone else?? I wonder how the FCC would view that.
This sort of stuff is very little different from stuff you can see demonstrated at various hacker conferences.
I won’t post the details in case it gives anyone ideas as this stuff is trivial to build using commonly available parts if you have the know-how.
As toxic as this community can be, I mean just hating on shit. The site has really gone right down the shitter over the years.
Hey YOU!
Just because all the articles with no actual content come from Brian Benchoff doesn’t mean that he’s causing HaD to “go down the shitter”! Some of us like content-less articles devoid of any technical merit. It’s a good break from all those damn articles with “facts”, or “information”, where we might learn something and hurt our brains.
Keep up the great work Brian. Don’t let this guy get you down!
Love,
AC
+1
The man is a criminal and a fool, everyone knows the best way to deal with noise pests is with a microphone, a chaotic (decimating) reverb and a 1000 W PA. There is nothing better than the “echo from hell” to shut up a pest.
A friend at work had a “problem” with an A-hole that listened to the “wrong” kind of music (read: Heavy Metal) on a radio. His solution was similiar-a radio test rig that could transmit a weak modulated carrier, but also just the carrier frequency unmodulated.
He would flick it on CW mode and slowly increase the amplitude until the radio station was blocked. If he shifted stations, he would just slowly change the frequency. Blissful silence.
I figured out what he was doing, but never let on to either of them. It was more fun to watch and just quietly chuckle to myself.
Motto of the story-don’t f#@k with a nerd-they’re…creative.
Nothing Better than a little GEEK REVENGE! Published Jan 29, 2016
Okay, so this might be my favorite story of all time… saddle up and make sure you read this one with a little rage in your heart. Let me start out with some background. When I got my first place, it was incredible! Everything was cool and all, but I was on the first floor of a 3-floor apartment building. As expected, neighbors would be noisy… hmm, well the person that lived above me wore heels and most nights it sounded like she was running laps up there. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, so when the lease was up, I moved out.
Now we get to the good stuff. My second place was a town house. This is where you only have neighbors on either side – nobody above you, which I ‘thought’ was a good thing. Shortly after moving in, I realized the neighbor to my right had his TV mounted on our shared wall… and he liked singing along to American Idol and also enjoyed letting his girlfriend scream at him all hours of the night. After a few months of misery, he finally moved out…. but then things got really bad…
I had a few months of peace and quiet, but then the neighbors to my left now started making noise. Turns out a large family moved in next door and they liked their music… all hours of the morning, day, and night! I gave my last F one night after getting off of a long day of work and relentlessy pounded on the wall until the music stopped. This actually seemed to work temporarily, but then slowly, the music would start creeping back on. The thing people don’t realize is that the low frequency bass in music cuts through everything – walls, doors, headphones, and ear buds! It got so bad that I left notes on their front door, which did nothing, so I actually got the landlord involved. Things actually seemed to get worse…
One Sunday morning after a night of drinking a few too many beers I started hearing some thumping bass. Note that this was at about 7AM! Time to engineer a solution to this problem! I was seeing RED! I started rifling through my junk and decided that I’m going to build a massive EMP generator out of every capacitor and inductor that I could muster up. The plan was to blow out their stereo system with a giant electromagnetic blast – yes, this was blind rage hacking! Then, suddenly, I had a moment of clarity. I noticed my handheld amateur radio sitting there on my desk. Maybe if I click the transmit button, their speakers will ‘click’? Maybe that will annoy them to the point to kill the music? Eh, why not test this out?
So I walk over the wall that literally was bumping so loud with music that I could feel it vibrating to the touch. I mean, the pictures on my walls were chattering. The rage was building… So I point the antenna to the wall… push the transmit button at some obscure frequency… and, and…. silence!
Yes, right after pressing the button, the music silenced! A few seconds later, the music came right back on. Hmm, could I have just timed it out perfectly that their music was in the middle of a song change? Time for another test – this is science after all :) the experiment must be repeatable. I hit the button again… silence! Can you believe it! The radio had enough TX power to completely knock out their stereo. I messed with them all morning! It was so funny, every time I killed their music, I heard the whole family over there hootin and hollerin trying to figure out what was going on. The picture you see up there was actually my setup with my external antenna pointing right at there wall. Any time I heard them get out of line with the music, I’d just walk over and put them in their place. Sometimes I think I actually looked forward to hearing music :) Yes, this is evil and I’m sure the FCC is not cool with this, so don’t replicate this little experiment of trying to communicate with someone with your amateur radio through a wall into a noisier than crap townhouse. [Note – I do have my license]
I eventually moved out of that place into a house, but that is by far my favorite story of GEEK REVENGE that I’ve ever experienced. What’s yours?
e-v-i-l- grin…. i like, OLE!
I think a better solution would be to shine the IR “off” for every make of stereo in the window until you hit on the right one.
I don’t think IR travels through walls.
Window
You have windows into your neighbour’s fla
Why turn it off? Turn it UP instead! Many amplifiers un-mute when they receive volume up or down signals from the remote. If not, send mute – volume up to maximum – un-mute. That should properly scare the crap out of them.
I would have just duct taped a 2 way radio to the wall. If you transmit anywhere close to a speaker it will fuck up the sound.
Yeah, IR hacking is trivial.
I once toyed with the idea of putting one of these on a drone that told every TV it encountered to switch to some obscure freesat/sky channel that most people leave enabled. Say during a showing of a film with the “Emergency Broadcast Signal” on it..
But that would be mean :-)
Thought about using a tv-be-gone to modulate an IR laser. Then you would have a scoped sniper version where you could pick out every tv in a hi-rise one by one from a mile away.
Just how picky ARE those IR receivers? I know the ones I play with need 920~ish nm while a lot of the inexpensive IR lasers are around 808nm…
Hey Brian,
Thanks for the great article. I love the part where you don’t have any facts about anything and just essentially re-post some dudes probably made up rant about doing something that is illegal. I sure learned a lot!
My favorite part through was the link to the Patreon page. That’s almost better than your usual kickstarter ad!
Love Always,
AC
Thank you for putting my exact thoughts into words.
Me, I would just turn of their breaker for the apartment. Next step is to loosen one of the neutral wires on the breaker box. Nasty unbalanced loads on 220VAC.
That would put 400V ac on appliances with more than one phase so risking more than only killing their stereo.
Great so you plan on electrocuting the guy then burning his house down, assuming you don’t kill your self in the process.
Keep up the good work, there’s sure to be a Darwin Award in your future.
Piling on with the other haters: while HaD has posted a number of articles that detail activities that were unsafe/doubtful legality, the bywords were “detail”, and “disclaimer”. This provides only the less interesting byword. Look, if Lady Freakin’ Ada can post the description and design for a “Wave Bubble”, then the least HaD could do is to encourage the poster to come back when he can technically document his feat. Whether he CHA or not is another matter.
Just cut an inch or so from the mains cable. Problem solved.
Not actually illegal, if:
1. He is licensed
2.His equipment is operating within FCC requirements.
3. The blocking of the neighbor’s equipment is caused by its inadequate Part 15 performance (virtually guaranteed)
Not exactly sure about FCC (not my country), but intentional interference is illegal virtually anywhere due to international treaties.
Look it up for your country. For the USA, if your signal is legal and clean and you are properly licensed to transmit, there is nothing illegal if the appliance that sees “interference” is malfunctioning—and that is exactly what the neighbor’s appliance is doing-malfunctioning . The Amateur operator is not required to resolve the matter, but unfortunately many do just to keep the peace. The FCC, the EIA and other agencies are useless–only our ARRL helps. Yet, us amateurs are stuck within the illegal interference from cheap consumer lighting, appliances, computers-you name it. Also the power company RFI–unless a transformer is about to catch fire, they won’t issue a work ticket–personal experience. Again, only the ARRL helps. Our CFR47 part 97 is strictly enforced on the Amateurs here–but if commercial equipment malfunctions the FCC looks the other way.
Agreed! These pansy people give opinions rather than fact. Geeks any more should have opinions based on facts rather than words spewed from there A$$.
Power companies often *will* respond, but you have to word your request somewhat particularly. Mention that you’re getting a lot of RF interference from equipment on pole number NNNN (read the tag) at address so-and-so, and IT SOUNDS LIKE INSULATORS DO RIGHT BEFORE THEY FAIL. Magic words, dude(tte). Magic. Same day service.
1) wazup’s point is correct. I understand that the caliber of the articles/respondents on HaD are not expected to be EE grad level, but unfortunately the unaware will read HaD and take it all as fact. It is not anywhere near the vetted process of the IEEE Transactions, for example.
2) eriklscott ‘s point about power companies is also correct. A safety issue will (and should) take precedent over RFI interference issues, but the interference issue should not be ignored. In my case the strong MF/HF/VHF problem was found one night 4 blocks away as an insulator on a pole transformer was visibly arcing.
Yep I did something like that back in the 70’s when I was in the air force and lived next to a jerk.
I used to have bad neighbors living floor below my flat. So when they became extra-annoying, I took a hammer and every day minute past 6 AM and minute before 10 PM I would pound floor in every room. Timing was important because local law states that between 10 PM and 6 AM people must be quiet. I did it for a week. It worked like a charm.
Few years earlier we had neighbor nest door, who threw loud parties every Friday night. They didn’t give a flying duck about laws. So my brother borrowed a post horn and woke them every Saturday morning…
To deal with neighbor with terrible musical taste I recommend playing as loud as possible Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude or something similar. Set it for a loop and leave home for few hours. It works according to my friend, who did that trick with 2x250W PA…
Doesn’t always work, there are grade A assholes that are impervious to such things.
Thanx for the tip, never knew name of song. Genuis
I couldn’t ever get the article to come up. AdBlock on/off, didn’t matter, still got sent to the homepage.
Just grab the URL from the post, paste it into a Google search, and pull the cache. Text-only is fine, as the background graphic doesn’t add anything to it.
My guess is he saturated the IF stage of the radio or perhaps simply saturated the circuit with carrier RF before the amplifier circuit. IF is often pretty low freq, so if he had been down deep in the kHz region he might have been fine legally in unlicensed territory, but the UHF/VHF Yaesu HT makes me believe he was just nuking them by selectively tuning a harmonic or as I said saturating pre-amplifier. I remember in my HF days having one of my X10 switched lights turn on and off as I banged away on CW or when I tuned my antenna, that was only 50w.
X10 ran (slow) data over the mains wires, not radio. Could have been a bad powersupply in your radio, or RF coupling in to the wires in your walls.
Correct, the RF can be picked up and resonate in any conductor, including power cables, a very good chance this is where the RF got into that neighbor’s stereo system. Likely antennas also include the speaker wires, when dealing with noise any conductor can be an antenna.
As for late 90s X10 if you ever crack one open you will see what crap they were. Not sure if you are thinking that my radio set(not a POS) was somehow transmitting back through the power supply(also not a POS), but it is far more likely that the building power wiring was picking up the RF and there was enough leaking over somewhere in the lightbulb adapter to switch the SCR to on. I very rarely ran more than QRP as it was an urban apartment and I was a polite neighbor.
This is exactly why I’m glad I’ll be dead before the world finishes converting to a yuppie farm where everyone is in a apartment between work shifts..
Some of my worse experiences were living in an apartment.. Which is why I ONLY live outside of apartments and housing developments..
There was also a talk at DEFCON a few years back of popping GFCIs w/ a handheld. (little 8w handheld… and she did it on stage.)
https://youtu.be/hT9LwyjpfzI
I work in a government shipyard that shall remain un-named, We STILL have problems with this. We use little FRS/GMRS Two-Way Radios when troubleshooting. Anytime we get close to the temp services distribution box (Ships normal power is not live) we end up tripping the GFCIs and all the lights go out.
INteresting! So perhaps if our putative revenger’s house shared a wall with his neighbour’s distribution box, that could be how it worked. It’d fit in with the one burst disabling the stereo for a while, while the neighbours went to check the breaker.
@Navy_Ken – Talk to your local MOTU-# unit. Request SCIF materials to line the interior of all of your affected TSD Boxes on base. But if you don’t feel like doing all the red tape requisition forms, just go to local Home Depot/Lowes just around the corner from the base and buy some rolls of metal chicken-wire. Line the interior of all your TSD boxes, making sure all chicken wire walls are electrically connected (soldered) and grounded in the box. You would have just made a mini-SCIF without all the USN paperwork. However MOTU should do the installations for you. You’ll have to explain that you really don’t need it for real SCIF purposes but is simply “Faraday Shielding” for RFI/EMF to the sensors in the GFCI’s on base. They’ll want to address this right away as you just exposed an Opsec problem/issue. They also may be upset that you are using FRS/GMRS rather than standard milcom. But I understand your thinking though… :-)
Speaking of GEEK’S REVENGE… what do you think about these two innovated methods to deal with your rude noisy neighbor? It’s totally legal and probably very effective… BTW a “flat” is a British term for APARTMENT.
https://jpst.it/FjxK
I have pretty bad neighbors next to our house. Would it work at a distance?
I would like to disagree with the ones that say this isn’t a hack. Dude went on a mission to null speakers, tried a few things and found a flaw, a vulnerability or weakness. He applied the attack on the speakers and even if by accident was successful. Therefore his attack was successful and illegal. And like the good ethical hacker should he posted his results. Now it’s up to the vulnerable parties to send out a patch. To bad it wasn’t a zero day hack, he may have made some money.
Correct, if you leave out the part of the story where this all happened in the land of make believe.
When I was a kid, we had a similar guy in the house. We went up the rooftop, look for the guy’s antenna, connect it to a VCR and play the worst porn VHS we could find in my brother’s room.
How’d you know which antenna was his? Why was his TV tuned into the VCR’s transmitting frequency? Why didn’t he just change the channel? What was this guy doing in your house when you were a kid?
I had a problem with my upstairs neighbors, years ago, they’d make fckn noise 21 hours a day! Asked them to mute it a bit, asked the cops to act… No one did… So I decided to act. Got myself a nice sine wave generator and a 22″ speaker, screwed the speaker to the ceiling and attached it to a 1 Watt amp… Keep the frequency low, sub sonic… 3-4 Hz… You don’t hear it, you can’t pinpoint it, but it will drive you crazy. Leave it on all day when at work, turn off when you get home and…. they are quiet! They don’t even know why :D
Use universal remotes to cause noise complaints figure out brand turn on tv turn up volume then call the cops and collect three hundred dollar bounty from government
I have a neighbour on the same electrical line as one in my apartment and they’ve been using some kind of ac line surge attack on my computer that resets my secondary sata drive (maybe capacitor based emp?). They also seem to be into other RF based attacks such as signal intrusion and even keyboard RF playback attacks, all using SDR. I don’t play loud music or make noise at all, and generally just stick to myself. How do you insulate yourself from that without having to enclose your apartment in a $4000 faraday cage?