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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."
This dude had better move his miner, or the FCC might send him another harshly worded letter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This machine was highly modified. They guy is also a tinfoil hat type who thought he was creating free energy with his modifications.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
How much you want to bet that the Antminer S5 has no FCC ID, because they never bothered to get one.
He could turn it back on, he just needs to put his miner inside a faraday cage of some kind.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
The letter states he can operate it if he fixes the interference. TFS makes it sound like the FCC won't let him mine bitcoin at all.
Forget mining Bitcoin, run a micro radio station. The FCC will never notice that.
Disrupting emergency services, helping global warming, distributing child porn... Is there anything Bitcoin CAN'T do?
700 MHz is in the 10s of cm range as far as wavelength. Should be easy to construct some kind of Faraday cage to block the interference (while still allowing for air cooling), with filters on the AC line and Ethernet to prevent them from radiating as antennas.
Why would he have radio emissions while running a bitcoin miner?
And he was sure to make a MILLION dollars with that mining rig!
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.
Because this — policing spectrum — is their job. Note, they didn't tell him, he must spend equal amounts of electricity mining all cryptocurrencies...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's irony in posting an insulting correction with its own factual error. In this case, aluminum foil is not a reliable shield for cell phones: 1 mil (the thickness of typical Al foil) is too close to the skin depth for those frequencies. Try it yourself. Just be sure to choose a location with decent cell service.
A little judicious shielding might easily fix the problem, but then there is the heat... I had a friend up north who heated his house with his Bitcoin miner system until his electric bill made it not worth the trouble anymore. Maybe the FCC is doing him a favor.
...I mean, isn't this one of the FCC's core missions?
They're not chasing him because he's interfering with T-Mobile per se (and honestly, their mentioning of it was stupid). They're chasing him because his device was generating interference, full stop.
-Styopa
I actually tried to construct a Faraday cage out of kitchen use tinfoil. in my first attempt I used a metal lockbox lined with tin foil. It wouldn't completely block cell phone signal and it wouldn't completely prevent keyless entry car keys from operating from within lockbox. I eventually had it working, but it wasn't just one sheet of tinfoil.
Try following - wrap your smartphone in tinfoil and call it.
That's the real story. FCC actually paying attention to it's own rules.
Now if only we can get them to do something about 7.200Mhz.....
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
Now everyone throw out your cheap CFLs and LED bulbs. You are screwing up my ham radio. Come on, FCC. Where is your van when we need it?
Have gnu, will travel.
If a single non-radio'd IoT device can reek havoc to Brooklyn's LTE, could a rouge entity--government or otherwise--use millions of compromised devices to bleed all over the 700MHz channel across the country, perhaps in a coordinated attack? Could our smart thermostats and doorbells take down our mobile communications?
10 time skin depth may be considered generally sufficient, but the fact remains that cell phone signals penetrate aluminum foil. Go and and try it (as I suggested). Your "shielded" phone will ring when you call it.
I could be mistaken about the skin effect being the cause of the leakage, but you remain wrong in claiming that foil blocks these signals.
This could really be fixed with aluminum foil and a few ferrite toroids. Of course a nice metal box would be neater and better ventilated.
Bruce Perens.
Inferior troll is inferior. You are mistaken about nothing. You are cackling like a stoned teenager as you posit lies with 75% factual backing. What's your next claim going to be, that lead foil of the same thickness blocks "cell phone signals" better because it is denser?
How about YOU try it, beam weld all the foil together, and post a video on YouTube with today's datestamp.
"When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased,"
It's always that way in these cases.
I guess the FCC is represented by lawyers from No, Shit & Sherlock.
This is a "it depends" question. If you wrap your device in aluminum foil it can become capacitively coupled to the foil. You could fix that by putting it in a room completely lined with foil (increasing the thickness of the dialectric). Or you can connect your foil to a massive electron sink, like a large hunk of metal or the Earth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
n my first attempt I used a metal lockbox lined with tin foil. It wouldn't completely block cell phone signal and it wouldn't completely prevent keyless entry car keys from operating from within lockbox.
What did you think lining a metal box with aluminum foil would do? How much thicker were the sides of the lock box than the foil?
Ken
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
Place the miner in faraday cage: wrap miner in the foil, or properly shield it. Using that metric every single electric engine may become the source of interference.
This is basically a bench-top prototype. I LOL at the CE Mark visible on the PCB.
First, the open enclosure top. Really? The panels are all painted with no way to connect each other electrically. Even if you masked the screw heads from paint, and still have some long seams, it would be a significant improvement at 700MHz.
Connecting modules together with unshielded, unfiltered harnesses. This is almost certainly emitting most of the noise. Clamping a ferrite bead around each one would help tremendously.
Given the rest of the sloppiness, I'm sure the PCB design is junk also.
I used to have 6 of these S5's. It didn't interfere with my smartphone even at point blank.
Btw S5's aren't remotely profitable at the moment so no big loss there.
They can if they wish..
They have gone after retailers and importers who dealt in stuff that was radiating RF but didn't meet applicable standards. Problems is they need to know who is importing and selling the stuff. Which for a lot of this stuff isn't an easy nut to crack with the limited manpower of the FCC.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
OEM vendors have to, and small computer dealers building their own are supposed to.
However, each individual component has FCC certification and due to the FCC kit rules, so long as the end-user assembled it, and it doesn't cause harmful interference, it AFAIK falls under the 'up to 5 identical device' personal guidelines which allow you to build up to 5 identical electronics devices *NOT INTENDED FOR RESALE* and use them so long as they cause no harmful interference without the device being FCC certified.
Since computers are normally required to have their cases open during FCC certification, the individual components are generally well shielded enough to make personal assembly not cause interference with outside sources, and when combined with a properly grounded case effectively reduce that below background noise.
The above is also why most small computer manufacturers have you buy the parts individually and then charge you an assembly fee instead of giving you a flat price for the system itself. It allows them to avoid FCC sanctions/recalls since they were only hired to assemble the device and did not 'manufacture' it themselves. Hackaday or Adafruit or some other places discussed this a few years back.
That's the real story. FCC actually paying attention to it's own rules.
Now if only we can get them to do something about 7.200Mhz.....
Yea.. The "man" died who started that AM broadcasting mess down there before they could extract their fines from him. Took them almost 20 years to actually pull his ticket and get him off the air, even after his making a name doing daily broadcasts... Shesh...
The FCC doesn't have the manpower to fix what ails 7.200Mhz at this point so I guess they are choosing to wait for all the geezers like me to die and vacate the frequencies so they can auction them off for some coin.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If that complaint came from anywhere other than a hugely deep pocket, it'd have gone no where.
If a consumer complained about TMobile affecting his TV.... He'd die of natural causes before TMobile was made to fix it.
10base2 is thinnet. I have to admit it's been so long I checked that I wasn't mixing it up with base T (T connectors? "T"hinnet base2-pairs?). 10broad36 was news to me though.
10BaseT is "Twisted pair" Ethernet at 10 Mbps. The first digits are the bandwidth followed by "Base" for baseband or "Broad" for Broadband. The final digit(s) were the maximum segment length in hectometers. Of course "T" broke this scheme.
10Broad36 was 10 Mbps over 36 hectometers or 3600 meters. It was designed for long distances using standard cable TV hardware. We used it at Lawrence Livermore Lab for our first lab-wide LAN. It was, of course, replaced by fiber after about three years.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Would you like to buy some of these magnetic monopoles?
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They guy was damaging the performance of a lawful entity with his illegal equipment. He was degrading the service to T-Mobile's customers. He should be out there apologizing to T-Moblile's customers and paying them damages.
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