On being mobbed

[Note 02/15/23: It’s heartening to see that this blog entry is being read. There is other information that I’ve not had time to write up, including the amelioration that was allowed when a new electric service was installed at the Albany house and the electrical contractor corrected the old and inadequate grounding. The house still does have knob-and-tube wiring, so I cannot be sure of how much more amelioration further electrical work might bring, but the new service combined with professionally installed grounding made it easier for me to continue to survive. I can’t stress enough the importance of working with a licensed electrical contractor instead of a general contractor who does not have the expertise or the focus and might be more interested in the renovation or acquisition of. your home than in the integrity of its electrical systems. I believe it’s well worth the cost. I’m also pretty sure now, that houses with knob-and-tube are attractive to mobbers and that one of the reasons for this is that the lack of grounding that comes with knob-and-tube wiring makes it easy to monkeywrench the electrical service. Despite the changes to the electrical service, however, the criminals who mob adapt. Somewhere in there, the relationship between the ingress of EMFs or some charged debris and the older galvanized water lines or the water drainage system became apparent. This involvement of water lines might also be another reason—aside from access to rogue access points or IoT triggers—for what appears to be a pattern of strategic parking on the part of the mobbers. I’ll write more about that when I’m able but this information may be useful for others in my situation or investigators who might find it confirmatory. I haven’t returned to using the central heat in Albany despite the cold winter winds. But after years of living in a Seattle house without central heating, I’m accustomed to a bit of cold.]

[Note 04/16/22: Based on what I’ve learned these past months, it might be that the call letters of the “mobbers’ radio,” as I’ve called it, are E-M-F. The posts from March and April 2022 can explain.]

The First Industrial Revolution marked the era of the steam engine. The second, the Technological Revolution, heralded great advances in electricity and with them, communication technologies that catapulted America into the modern era. Electric power replaced the formidable combination of coal and steam as the fuel of choice. With electricity came the exploration of electromagnetism and rapid strides in the development of radio.

The German physicist Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of electromagnetic waves—radio waves—in 1887 (Heinrich Hertz, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_waves). Along the way, Hertz experimented with standing waves, dipole antennas, directionality, parabolic antennas, and more. The unit of measure for frequency, hertz, is named for him. Around 1910, years before the Great War, the American Major George Squier demonstrated the transmission of low-power radio frequency signals over a carrier wire, calling it the “wired wireless.” (“Carrier-Wave Telephony Over Power Lines: Early History,” Mischa Schwartz of Columbia University, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4752669). The first application of power line technology would be the telephone.

In 1918, telephony was an expensive and unreliable form of communication. The light-duty wires performed poorly in tough terrain and harsh winter conditions. Moreover, running telephone wires in parallel with power lines created electrical interference. Transmission of both currents over one carrier provided a solution.

California was home to some notable installations of carrier current transmission in these early years. The reliability of wintertime communications between the Feather River hydroelectric plants and the Oakland dispatcher’s office greatly improved with the 1922 installation of telephony over carrier current. This was followed by the 1923 addition of telephony via carrier current to the 220-kV Pitt River lines of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). These simplex systems featured coupling by antenna wire. Basically, this means that the line carrying the high-frequency telephone signal runs in parallel to and introduces the telephone signal to the power line.

This method of transfer sounds like a technique that mobbers might use if saturation through deploying access points is not in and of itself enough. Transfer of rogue sound from a communications carrier line to household electrical lines would require proximity of the sender house and transmitting line to the receiver. Not to mention the fact that it sounds like a good way to fry your neighbor. As one of the mobbers in Seattle once chortled: We radiated your head! And soon you’re going to be dead. In the case of a transmission wire that runs parallel to the victim power lines, perhaps a digital subscriber line (DSL) would work. This might work for a configuration like the one at the Albany house, where an access point that is represented as an all-in-one printer with closed loop phone capabilities has been deployed close to my electric meter as though to line up with the Dobby access points that encroach into and over the electric outlets that run the length of the house. Or perhaps a satellite television line like one that might have been installed by the somehow familiar looking old man that I photographed years back with the no-name satellite truck at the Seattle house. Either one might have been run parallel to the electric lines of my home simply by running them along the side of the neighboring house.

Perhaps even an extension cord could be used; there’s one running from front to back along the side of the house to the north of the Albany house—the house with the Dobby access points. Per a query on shortwave radio on the Radio Reference forum, “Interesting thought for a make shift antenna, has anyone used a 100ft extension cord as a sw antenna?” (https://forums.radioreference.com/threads/extension-cord-longwire.208308/). And a QRZ.com query titled “extension cord antenna” on the use of an extension cord as a high frequency (HF) antenna and radiator on a barge: “I was thinking of putting up a makeshift HF antenna… I’m thinking of using an extension cord as my radiator. I’m thinking of taking a 10 ft paint pole and lashing it to the handrail, wrapping the extension cord around the pole then wrap around a 5 gallon bucket at the base then use that as my radiator and use the barge for the ground” (https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/extension-cord-antenna.713962/). The “What? Who? Me?” approach to criminal harassment and household assault, using everyday tools that are seemingly benign, has obvious appeal to the lowlife who stalk their neighbors in plain sight. According to “ranndy,” commenting on a 2016 RadioMaster Reports brief on “Militia Radio Frequencies,” “It seems modern ‘militias’ are stuck in some kind of honor-bound third generation warfare notions, when in fact future civil armed confrontations will require fourth (and later generation warfare strategy and tactics. Only that which is in plain sight has any hope whatsoever of concealment” (“Militia Radio Frequencies,” RadioMaster Reports, January 19, 2016, https://radiofreeq.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/militia-radio-frequencies/).

The simplex systems using antenna coupling, like those of the California power companies in the early 1900s, were soon enough outpaced by duplex installations using capacitor coupling as high-voltage capacitors became available. According to Wikipedia, the coupling capacitor that is now commonly used to connect communications lines transmitters to high voltage lines “provides low impedance path for carrier energy to HV line but blocks the power frequency circuit by being a high impedance path” (“Power-line communication,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication). By the late 1920s, the industrial use of carrier current connection was well established in America and in Europe.

Ω

A few weeks back, at the California house, I called PG&E, California’s gas and electricity utility. It was a second call to follow up on an earlier request I made. I had asked them to remove the cut low-voltage AT&T and Comcast wires that were severed and hanging from the service drop of the house, or to tell me who could.

To be clear, when I refer to the house in California, I mean Albany, California. Albany is a city about a mile square that succeeded from Berkeley in 1908, about three years after PG&E incorporated (https://www.albanyca.org/our-city/our-community/history). Despite being adjacent to Berkeley, and despite serving as an overflow community for U.C. Berkeley, Albany tends to be less progressive. For parents worried about how their children might fare in the larger, more diverse schools of Berkeley and Oakland, over the last few decades admission to Albany’s schools has increased the competitiveness for its housing. The Albany Police, like many other police forces, are avid supporters of neighborhood watch groups. “Neighborhood Watch is focused on keeping you and your neighbors as safe as possible. You are a very important part of keeping your neighborhood safe because you may be the first set of eyes and ears to see something suspicious and report it” (https://www.albanyca.org/departments/police-department/gateway-to-services/crime-prevention/neighborhood-watch). And as in Seattle, where there’s criminal harassment and what looks like a nasty case of real estate speculation, a block watch captain, and perhaps even a city employee, is sure to be close by.

By the time I talked to the PG&E customer service representative, I was pretty frustrated with the difficulty of removing the low-voltage communications lines from the Albany house. No one should be freely harassed in her home over the infrastructure that her payments support. But the agent was tolerant and, to my surprise, scheduled a same day appointment to investigate possible voltage issues. It was in great contrast to AT&T’s less-than-impressive responses to any call or service request.

The lineman who showed up said he hadn’t heard other accounts of the harassment that I suspected was occurring over the electrical service. He checked the meter for obvious signs of tampering and told me that PG&E’s acceptable range for voltage was capped at 126. I hadn’t systematically tracked voltage or investigated frequency and harmonics with an industry-standard power logger but had sporadically used an inexpensive digital monitor purchased off of Amazon.com. I recalled a maximum voltage of 127. Saying that the voltage of my service should be the same as the house next door—the one with the Dobby access points—the lineman walked over to the neighbor’s smart meter. The voltage read 125. Though we agreed that the low-voltage lines left behind by AT&T and Comcast were not the responsibility of PG&E, the lineman removed the remnants of the lines from the side of the house, and back to their point of origin between the telephone poles to the north and to the south. The lineman then told me he would refer the matter to PG&E’s Communications department; they manage the utility’s radios and communications interfaces.

I had no expectation that removal of those lines would resolve the mobbing. My goal was to minimize the RF signal that might contribute to the rogue sound in my environment. The severed lines were located at the service drop for the house, above the meter and at or about the location of the access point for the all-in-one printer that was revealed by heat map.

After the removal, the mobbing lightened by a few degrees. But having had the recent success of modulating the harassment by shutting down circuit breakers in the electrical panel, a few degrees more was enough.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Smart meters, carrier current transmission, and the mobbers’ radio.