hey kids,
you know in certain films (generally of the spy variety) where the bad guy broadcasts his demands to the people of the world and /or a certain country, generally the USA, and he takes over every single channel, can this actually be done?
what equipment would you need?
i realise the suspension of disbelief element, but i seem to remember a few years ago when some fools were interupting broadcasts with short bursts of a guy ranting in a gorilla mask on the news.
cant remember whether this was in the US or not though.
any ideas?
coming atcha from the UK,
pauly t
Technically speaking, not impossible. If a President’s address to the nation can easily be carried on multiple channels, there already exists a method for TV networks to share a single signal.
But these programs are not carried on ALL channels. And not ALL countries. It would be extremely difficult to accomplish a multi-network or multi-channel sync without a lot of inside cooperation.
But maybe in the future…
If you just wanted to broadcast a basic signal to all stations, you could use a big spark gap transmitter.
When electricity arcs through air (a spark gap), it creates an electromagnetic pulse, like a small nuke. It creates a short burst at eery frequency. You can see this working in some vacuum cleaners, when the brushes in the motor contact and lose contact with other bits of the motor, it creates a spark, which will show up as static on a nearby TV.
Anyway, with a bit of electroncis, you can modulate the sparks so that a signal can be sent. You’d have to have a really really big one to be able to broadcast all over the U.S., though.
TV and radio stations broadcast in two modes: as repeaters of another signal, or in “local origination” mode.
It’s impossible, IMHO, to blanket all local origination signals with your pirate signal.
However, if you can take over the uplinks of 5 networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Fox) you could get your signal onto all stations that are repeating the network feed at that time. That would probably give you about 90% or better “penetration”.
However, any of these local stations could switch off the network feed.
Cable networks - a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
World-wide - can’t do it.
The Emergency Alert System (EAS) replaced the Emergency Broadcast system (EBS)
http://www.fcc.gov/eb/easfact.html
(note: I believe the “Rachel Alert” recently used in Utah for the Elizabeth Smart abduction used the EAS)
The Diabolic folks could easily hit the major news networks and maybe the NYC networks and they’d have as world-wide an audience as they could want.