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Distress Signal Emitted By Flat-Screen TV
pinqkandi writes "CNN is a running a story on an Oregon college student's flat-screen Toshiba TV which was releasing the 121.5 MHz international distress signal. He was unaware of the issue until local police, search and rescue, and civil air patrol members showed up at his apartment's door. Apparently the signal was strong enough to be picked up by satellite and then routed to the Air Force Rescue Center in Virginia. Quite impressive - luckily Toshiba is offering him a free replacement."
It's well known that certain hardware hacks for Dishnetwork receivers emit this same frequency.
What a coincidence that a college student (no money) would be doing something technical (education) to get TV for free.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
And even more depressing that someone would choose to see the capability of receiving a distress signal as something other than a good thing (TM).
-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -A.Einstein
i have talked a few times with someone who worked in the TSCM business (surveillance countermeasures). these are the real guys, not the ones you see with the $99 bug detector. the standard range that they now perform sweeps in goes from DC-300 ghz. i was naturally very interested in what they would be looking for above 30ghz and while the person i talked to admitted that he never personally found anything up in those frequencies, it was well known in their community that such devices were known to exist though they would likely be the domain of only the top government agencies. at any rate the device that he described would look something like the size of a coin and be able to send data in the high ghz range using spread spectrum burst communications directly to an overhead LEO satellite; essentially the ability to bug someone from space using areas of the spectrum that most would never look at and even if they did would likely never actually "see' the transmission unless they were lucky enough to see it transmitting and then only if they were knowledgable enough to recognize the signal from the surrounding noise. scary, huh...
> It turns out it got stuck on the Lifetime
> network, so it really was in a state of
> distress.
I had a TV (also by Toshiba, coincidently) that would crash when it showed the local community channel. When that happened, it did not accept any key presses on the remote or on the TV set itself, so I couldn't change the channel anymore.
Basically, my TV forced me to watch the horrible Hamburg community channel.
I complained to Toshiba and it turned out that this channel aired a non-standard Teletext that had the ability crash this particular TV's teletext decoder.
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