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FCC Orders a Brooklyn Man To Turn Off His Bitcoin Miner Because It Was Interfering With T-Mobile's Wireless Network (arstechnica.com)
A New York City resident was ordered to turn off his bitcoin miner after the Federal Communications Commission discovered that it was interfering with T-Mobile's wireless network. From a report: After receiving a complaint from T-Mobile about interference to its 700MHz LTE network in Brooklyn, New York, FCC agents in November 2017 determined that radio emissions in the 700MHz band were coming from the residence of a man named Victor Rosario. "When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased," the FCC's enforcement bureau told Rosario in a "Notification of Harmful Interference" yesterday. "You identified the device as an Antminer S5 Bitcoin Miner. The device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile's broadband network and causing harmful interference." The FCC told Rosario that continued interference with T-Mobile's network while operating the device would be a violation of federal laws "and could subject the operator to severe penalties, including, but not limited to, substantial monetary fines, in rem arrest action to seize the offending radio equipment, and criminal sanctions including imprisonment."
I know right? You half expect Pai to check his bank statements before he makes any decision on who is interfering with whom.
How do you know he didn't? Sort of sounds like T-Mobile pays the FCC for spectrum and this guy doesn't.
I don't know, but it works for me.
What you want here isn't just a shield, it's a choke - the emission was probably via the power supply cable.
Plates? Please don't comment about things you don't understand. Openings have to be smaller than the wavelength of the noise being addressed. At 700 MHz easy. Wrap it in chicken wire, solder the edges, ground it, done. Doesn't have to be perfect.
This isn't antenna design. Anybody who flunked basic physics can build a faraday cage.
Shoplifters have had this down for years.
Wires, especially bundled with grounds, longer than a few wavelengths (power cords) or made up of twisted pairs (ethernet cables) make very shitty antennas.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You misunderstand the actual power of the FCC. Their threats are NOT empty. They have the power to levy fines, have right of entry powers, etc. They don't give a fly fuck about two CB channels cross talking... but fuck with spectrum that's being used by a commercial or governmental entity and they'll drop a fucking hammer on your head.
I was once involved with a college radio station and due to an equipment malfunction (our attenuator failed) we were accidentally transmitting at a much higher power than we should have... the FCC showed up at a campus, exercised their right of entry, disconnected our receiver and then changed the locks. Needless to say, it was a fluckercluck.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I used to be able to hear my neighbors shitty CB radio plus linear through my landline, TV, radio and microwave oven.
The FCC has very limited resources to investigate interference complaints, so RESIDENTIAL users generally go by the wayside.
Until they start interfering with a commercial radio service or public safety, at which point the FCC prioritizes a reponse --- i've heard the people who work for that agency say they try to have all complaints from businesses addressed within 10 days or less, and for public safety the time frame is 24 hours.
So if someone's pumping out CB with an Illegal 1Kilowatt amplifier; pinning the coax doesn't sound too unreasonable -- CB users are not legally to be using ANY kind of amplifiers anyways - the FCC generally just isn't there to quickly solve your personal RF woes caused by a neighbor anymore, unless they're making trouble for many people...
Unless you have a HAM licence to protect you can, more or less, ignore them.
Um... your license, If you have one, isn't even at risk, unless you have a bad history or refuse to cooperate with them and
allow station inspections or were being ridiculously negligent or doing deliberately doing something very bad like out-of-band
emissions, emitting an excessive wattage at ground levels, or failing to suppress harmonics...
Most cases of "interference" are just people using cheap electronics, TVs, Phones, etc which are inadequately shielded ---
in this case, the legal responsibility is for the people suffering interference to buy equipment of good design, instead.
To be a bit pedantic, the original post called out "tin foil". While I'm sure he meant aluminum foil and most likely has never actually seen tin foil, it was the predecessor of aluminum foil an it wold have worked much better than aluminum foil. It was far thicker, though probably not enough so to have worked completely.
To those who have never worked with RF, it is almost magical. Many thing, including skin effect, sound silly and are counter intuitive to those who have experience with DC and low frequencies. I recall an argument with a computer scientist who had added a new 10Base2 drop by inserting a "T" connector into the network line in his office and then dropped an RG58 to another piece of equipment. Transmission lines were WAY beyond his ken and I'm not sure he ever believed me, but I did fix his network.
Bonus old-timer points to those who know what 10Base2 is (or, more obscure, 10Broad36) without Googling for it.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired